LIBRARY 

ST/»T-  TEACHER'S  COLIEGE 

SA   TA   jA*BA*/yt<iALIFORNIA 


f/f 


THE    WORLD'S    FOOD 
RESOURCES 


BY 

USSELL   SMITH 

PROFESSOR  OF  ECONOMIC    GEOGRAPHY   IN   COLUMBIA    UNIVERSITY 

Author  of  "  Industrial  and  Commercial  Geography"  "  Commerce  and 
Industry,"  "  The  Influence  of  the  Great  War  on  Shipping  " 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


COVTRIOHT,    1919 
BY 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANV 


PRINTED   IN   THE   U.   S.   A. 


LI   RA'Y 

ER  S  C    L 


SA..TA 


2 

PREFACE 

IN  the  preparation  of  this  book  the  problem  of  statistical  illus- 
tration has  been  peculiarly  unsatisfactory.  It  is  an  attempt  to 
consider  things  as  they  will  be  in  the  world  of  peace  that  we  hope 
is  to  come.  Conditions  during  the  period  1914-18  were  so 
disturbed  that  production  figures  would  not  serve  as  good  illus- 
trations. For  this  reason  we  had  to  go  back  to  the  period  before 
the  war,  hence  the  frequent  references  to  figures  of  1911-13. 
In  most  cases  they  were  the  last  normal  figures  available. 

It  is  a  pleasure  to  acknowledge  the  assistance  I  have  received 
in  the  preparation  of  this  book  from  my  wife,  Henrietta  Stewart 
Smith,  and  also  from  my  secretary,  Miss  Anna  Y.  Satterthwaite, 
and  Mr.  C.  Raymond  Michener.  Our  combined  labors  kept 
idleness  far  away  from  a  mountain  camp  in  the  summer  and 
autumn  of  1918.  It  is  to  the  diligent  aid  of  these  assistants  that 
the  prompt  completion  of  this  book  is  due,  and  by  many  facts, 
compilations,  and  suggestions  have  they  enriched  it.  I  am  also 
indebted  to  Dr.  Louis  N.  Robinson  of  Swarthmore,  Pennsylvania, 
for  valuable  counsel  with  regard  to  the  plan  of  the  book,  and  to 
Mr.  Robert  Atkinson  of  Wrightstown,  Pa.,  for  material  in  con- 
nection with  the  chapter  on  Dairy  Products. 

For  that  great  kindness,  critical  reading  of  galley  proofs, 
I  am  indebted  to  Professors  C.  J.  Posey  of  the  University  of 
Minnesota  and  N.  A.  Bengston  of  the  University  of  Nebraska, 
and  to  Mr.  O.  E.  Baker  and  Miss  Helen  M.  Strong  of  the  Bureau 
of  Farm  Management,  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture. 

In  the  reading  of  page  proofs  I  am  glad  to  acknowledge  the 
assistance  of  Miss  Margaret  J.  McCoy  of  the  Philadelphia  Nor- 
mal School  and  Miss  Cornelia  J.  Shoemaker  of  Lincoln,  Va. 

J.  RUSSELL  SMITH. 

War  Trade  Board, 

Washington,  D.  C., 
November  25,  1918. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

INTRODUCTION 3 

I.    WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION    ...  14 

II.    WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS  .  40 

III.  MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE  .       .  67 

IV.  RICE 86 

V.    CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 107 

VI.    POTATOES — STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH  .       .  138 

VII.    STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS     ....  158 

VIII.   MEAT,  MEN,  AND  LAND 173 

IX.   FORAGE  AND  DRAFT  ANIMALS — THE   BASIS  OF 

WESTERN  CIVILIZATION  AND  FOOD  SUPPLY  .  188 

X.   THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE       ....  216 

XI.   DAIRY  PRODUCTS 240 

XII.   THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 270 

XIII.  SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY  .  295 

XIV.  EDIBLE  FATS 314 

XV.    THE  FISH  SUPPLY 329 

XVI.   VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS     .       .  355 

XVII.    THE  APPLE 377 

XVIII.   PEACHES,    APRICOTS,    PLUMS,    CHERRIES,    AND 

PEARS     .       . 396 

XIX.    THE  CANNING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES  .       .  406 

XX.   DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES      .       .  '    .  417 

XXI.    CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE  ....  433 

XXII.    SUGAR 452 

XXIII.  TEA  AND  COFFEE      ....  .487 

XXIV.  CHOCOLATE  AND  SPICES 505 

XXV.    THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY  ...               .  517 

XXVI.    TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY  .  542 

XXVII.    THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN        .  566 

XXVIII.   HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR    .                             .  599 

INDEX                        601 


THE  WORLD'S  FOOD  RESOURCES 


INTRODUCTION 

FOB  two  years  the  people  of  Europe  and  America  have  been 
reading  about  diet,  studying  nutrition,  practising  cookery,  talk- 
ing about  food,  and  wondering  about  the  food  supply  as  never 
before. 

Has  food  shortage  come  to  stay,  or  is  there  a  bounteous  future 
ahead  of  us?  The  answer  to  that  question  depends  on  how  man 
behaves.  The  injunction  of  Jehovah  to  Adam  and  Eve  in  the 
Garden  of  Eden  still  holds  good.  The  earth  is  still  a  potential 
Eden  with  room  (food  possibilities)  for  many,  many  more  of  the 
children  of  men.  We  have  subdued  the  earth  far  more  exten- 
sively than  Adam  dreamed  of  doing.  It  is  more  completely  ours 
than  Eden  was  Adam's.  Now  as  then,  man's  greatest  enemy  is 
himself.  Food  we  can  have  in  great  abundance  if  we  devote  our 
time  to  the  continued  conquest  of  the  earth,  and  to  the  utilization 
of  nature,  rather  than  to  the  conquest  of  each  other.  But  there 
can  be  only  death  and  starvation  for  millions  of  men  if  we  con- 
tinue to  indulge  in  war.  Nations  are  no  longer  independent. 
We  have  become  dependent  on  a  great  fabric  of  trade ;  when  it 
is  destroyed,  we  die. 

It  is  the  object  of  this  book  to  present  some  of  the  facts  con- 
cerning the  world's  food  supply  and  the  possibilities  of  food 
supply,  and  to  discuss  the  outlook  for  the  future.  The  war  has 
madeus  think  about  food — a  little. 

^Did~you  ever  figure  out  just  what  you  would  do  if  your  food 
supply  failed  ?  You  probably  have  not,  but  a  good  observer  who 
has  seen  men  in  all  stages  of  starvation  in  the  Yukon  wilderness  ^ . 
has  it  worked  out  in  this  way:£[lf  a  man  misses  his  meals  one 
day,  he  will  lie.  If  he  misses  his  meals  two  jlays,  he  will  steal. 
If  he  misses  his  meals  three  days,  he  will  killjj\ 

This  may  sound  far-fetched,  but  in  reality  it  is  just  an  every- 
day fact  that  has  not  hitherto  come  up  for  our  consideration. 
^Having  had  an  abundant  food  supply,  we  have  never  had  to 

8 


4  INTRODUCTION 

consider  possibilities  of  famine.  Our  world  commerce,  which  is 
very  new,  has  run  so  smoothly  for  a  while  that  we  do  not  under- 
stand the  troubles  of  the  past,  nor  as  yet  the  vital  problems  of 
the  present.  Tens  of  millions  of  us  depend  upon  a  great  world- 
wide mechanism  daily  to  bring  us  food.  So  far  as  food  is  con- 
cerned, modern  man  has  the  independence  of  a  bird  in  a  cage, 
no  more.  He  depends  upon  the  continuance  of  world  trade. 

We  in  America  have  been  peculiarly  free  from  anxiety  about 
food  shortage.  With  us  it  was  at  worst  merely  the  question 
which  food  we  should  buy.  We  have  lived  on  a  continent  that 
was  secure  and  rich — the  richest  in  all  the  history  of  man.  We 
have  been  a  whole  world  to  ourselves.  Suddenly  we  found  our- 
selves only  a  part  of  a  bigger  world — and  a  hungry  one. 

We  have  been  lulled  and  dulled  by  the  comfort  and  security 
of  far-reaching  trade.  The  world  market  is  excellent,  when  it  is 
well  supplied. 

For  two  generations  we  have  all  known  that  if  we  had  the 
price  or  the  credit,  goods  and  food  were  ours.  They  came  mys- 
teriously by  night  from  places  about  which  we  neither  knew  nor 
cared.  What  difference  did  it  make  to  the  housewife  of  Eng- 
land, or  of  New  England,  whether  her  flour  came  from  the  grain 
that  waved  in  the  fields  of  the  next  county  or  of  another  hemi- 
sphere? But  in  war  its  source  determined  the  lives  of  nations. 

Where  does  the  world 's  food  come  from  ? 

The  Great  War  with  its  starvation  made  nations  see,  really 
see,  what  a  century  of  world  trade  had  done  for  them  by  giving 
them  the  whole  world  from  which  to  feed  themselves.  In  the 
matter  of  food  supply  there  has  been  far  more  change  since 
the  days  of  George  Washington  than  there  was  in  all  the  time 
between  George  Washington  and  Caesar  or  Nebuchadnezzar,  or 
Cheops,  who  built  the  pyramids  of  Egypt.  In  1786  a  Massachu- 
setts farmer  wrote  a  pamphlet  telling  just  how  he  supported  his 
family.*  With  the  wheat  and  corn  and  buckwheat  that  grew  in 
his  fields  he  furnished  the  family  bread.  The  chickens,  pigs, 
sheep,  and  an  occasional  beef  that  he  slaughtered  furnished  the 
meat.  His  garden  furnished  all  the  vegetables  and  his  orchard 
all  the  fruits,  many  of  which,  along  with  garden  vegetables,  were 

*See  MacMaeter,  J.  B.:  History  of  the  People  of  the  United  States, 
Vol.  I. 


THE  WORLD  MARKET  S 

dried  for  winter  use.  Thus  the  farm  produced  the  family  food. 
For  clothing,  his  wife  spun  the  wool  which  he  sheared  from  the 
sheep;  and  the  flax  that  grew  in  the  corner  of  a  field  was  made 
into  linen.  The  skin  of  the  meat  animals  was  tanned  and  made 
into  the  family's  shoes,  and  thus  were  they  clothed.  The  trees 
from  his  wood  lot  furnished  the  boards  to  build  his  house,  and 
the  logs  for  his  fire,  and  the  rails  for  such  fences  as  were  not  of 
stone.  He  himself,  like  most  farmers  of  that  time,  was  a  fairly 
good  worker  in  wood,  and  had  a  little  blacksmith  shop,  so  that 
he  made  practically  all  of  his  own  tools  on  rainy  days  and  in 


FIG.  1. — The  distribution  of  people  is  remarkable  in  its  unevenness. 
(Finch  and  Baker,  Atlas  of  the  World's  Agriculture.) 

snowy  winter  weather.  Only  a  few  things  were  needed  from  the 
outside  world,  such  as  salt,  pepper,  a  little  lead  and  gunpowder, 
and  iron  for  his  little  forge.  These  outside  products  cost  him 
altogether  $10  a  year,  permitting  him  to  save  $150  out  of  the 
$160  received  for  the  wheat  and  cattle  that  he  sold. 

In  that  day  trade  was  confined  to  luxuries.  The  countries  of 
the  world  like  the  colonial  farmer  tended  to  be  economically  inde- 
pendent. They  had  to  be  so.  The  locality  that  could  not  furnish 
most  of  the  materials  for  man's  food,  clothes,  shelter,  and  fire, 
remained  unused.  Men  clustered  along  the  shores  of  the  sea 
and  navigable  rivers  in  that  comparatively  small  part  of  the 
world  where  resources  were  reasonably  complete.  If  crops  were 


6  INTRODUCTION 

short,  men  went  hungry.  If  crops  failed,  men  starved,  as  they 
did  in  England  in  Shakespeare's  time.  For  many  centuries 
the  month  of  May  was  called  in  England  the  starving  time, 
because  it  was  the  last  month  before  the  beginning  of  the  first 
new  food  crop,  and  therefore  the  period  of  greatest  scarcity. 
Most  of  the  central  parts  of  all  the  continents  save  Europe 
were  empty,  because  of  the  absence  of  even  the  small  trade 
that  went  in  the  sailing  vessel  and  the  river  boats  of  those 
days.  • 

In  the  United  States,  only  in  the  last  few  decades  have  Iowa, 
Kansas,  and  the  Dakotas  become  important  granaries  of  the 
world.  Canada  is  but  beginning;  and  in  South  America  the 
plains  of  the  Argentine  were  the  possession  of  savages  and  wild 
animals  when  man  invented  the  locomotive  and  the  steamship, 
although  the  white  man  had  been  in  possession  of  the  shores  of 
both  Americas  for  at  least  three  centuries.  He  could  go  far 
inland  only  on  rare  and  venturesome  exploring  trips,  such  as 
the  journey  of  Lewis  and  Clark  to  Oregon  in  the  first  decade  of 
the  last  century. 

It  is  only  in  the  last  hundred  years,  the  century  of  steam  and 
a  sea  clear  of  pirates,  that  man  has  begun  to  possess  and  utilize 
the  earth  to  any  great  extent,  and  we  are  yet  only  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  possibilities  of  such  utilization.  It  is  largely  sea  trade 
that  has  made  this  new  epoch  of  comfort,  and  it  is  by  sea  trade 
that  an  enriched  future  must  be  fed.  Sea  trade,  the  great  sea 
trade,  is  new.  It  has  made  population  increase  greatly  and 
suddenly,  the  result  of  ships  and  a  safe  sea.  This  century  of 
steam,  a  free  sea,  world  trade,  and  abundant  food,  has  enabled 
the  struggling  settlements  along  the  shores  of  America  to  in- 
crease their  numbers  twenty-fold  within  a  little  more  than  a 
century.  Europe  has  also  gained  enormously  in  population,  as 
have  South  America,  Africa,  Asia,  and  Australia.  Because  of 
this  world-wide  ship  business  connecting  with  the  railways  and 
permitting  a  world-wide  food  supply,  men  have  clustered  in 
places  where  it  was  good  to  live.  No  longer  dependent  on  their 
own  garden  spots,  they  could  eat  and  increase,  regardless  of 
local  harvests.  During  this  golden  age  of  the  larder,  food  al- 
ways came  from  some  far  place  if  it  was  not  produced  at  home. 
Men  have  been  able  to  cluster  so  closely  that  they  could  no 


THE  NEW  DEPENDENCE  7 

longer  live  upon  the  produce  of  the  land  in  which  they  dwelt, 
so  that  England  and  Scotland,  Holland  and  Norway,  Italy,  the 
Rhine-land,  in  fact  all  of  western  Europe  from  Norway  to 
Greece,  became  dependent  upon  the  sea  trade.  Without  it  they 
would  not  have  enough  to  eat.  Even  their  cows  depended  part.ly 
upon  antipodean  hay;  witness  the  export  of  baled  alfalfa  from 
Chile  to  Britain,  and  of  corn,  bran,  and  oil-cake  from  America 
to  Holland  and  Scandinavia. 

America  and  Japan  have  also  entered  into  the  world's  trade 
and  are  becoming  increasingly  dependent  upon  sea  trade.  New 
England  could  no  more  feed  herself  than  could  old  England, 
and  the  United  States  finds  itself  using  each  year  more  and 
more  products  from  overseas. 

Compare  the  food  and  clothes  of  the  Massachusetts  farmer  of 
1786  with  those  of  the  American  reader  of  this  book.  The  man 
of  today  starts  his  breakfast  with  an  orange  from  California  or 
Florida,  or  a  banana  from  Central  America,  or  an  apple  from 
Oregon,  Virginia,  or  New  York.  He  takes  a  shredded  wheat 
biscuit  made  in  Niagara  Falls  from  Dakota  wheat.  He  sugars 
it  with  the  extract  of  Cuban  cane.  He  puts  Wisconsin  butter  on 
bread  baked  of  Minneapolis  wheat  flour  mixed  with  Illinois  corn 
flour.  He  has  a  potato.  In  June  it  comes  from  Virginia,  in 
July  from  New  Jersey,  in  November  from  New  York,  Maine,  or 
Michigan.  If  he  indulges  in  meat,  it  is  a  lamb  chop  from  a 
frisky  little  beast  born  on  the  high  plains  near  the  Rocky  Moun- 
tains, and  fattened  in  an  Illinois  feed  lot  before  going  up  to 
Chicago  to  be  inspected,  slaughtered,  and  refrigerated.  He 
warms  and  wakes  himself  up  with  a  cup  of  coffee  from  Brazil 
(called  Mocha  perhaps)  or  tea  from  Ceylon  or  Japan,  or  cocoa 
from  Ecuador  or  the  coast  of  Guinea. 

So  much  for  the  breakfast  of  today.  Our  other  meals  arc 
equally  far-reaching,  and  our  clothing  also  is  a  collection  of 
stuffs  from  the  far  ends  of  the  world. 

This  development  of  dependence  had  gone  so  far  before  the 
war  that  England  produced  but  a  fifth  of  the  food  she  ate,  Italy 
two-thirds,  and  Germany  four-fifths. 

In  both  Europe  and  North  America  there  is,  facing  the 
Atlantic,  a  region  of  dense  populations — city  dwellers  and  manu- 
facturers in  districts  that  cannot  raise  enough  food  for  local 


8  INTRODUCTION 

needs.     Inland  from  this  region,  still  farther  from  the  Atlantic, 
is  the  zone  of  food  surplus  and  export. 

In  America  the  chief  region  of  food  surplus  is  the  Corn  Belt 
and  the  Great  Plains.  In  Europe  it  is  chiefly  the  East,  includ- 
ing Russia,  Rumania.  Serbia,  Hungary,  and  also  Denmark  and 
Sweden. 

On  both  continents  there  have  for  years  been  heavy  ship- 
ments of  food  from  the  agricultural  back-country  to  the  cities  on 
the  Atlantic.  New  England  furnishes  an  illustration. 

Massachusetts  produces  two  and  one-half  pecks  of  corn  per 
person,  and  not  enough  wheat  to  feed  the  hens  of  the  chicken 
fanciers.  She  has  but  four  cows  and  three  hogs  per  hundred 
people.  In  Wisconsin  there  are,  per  hundred  people,  67  cows; 
in  Iowa  453  hogs ;  and  in  Kansas  106  beef  cattle. 

Massachusetts  spreads  the  butter  of  Wisconsin  on  the  bread  of 
Dakota,  eats  the  meat  of  Kansas,  and  feeds  the  horse,  born  in 
Iowa,  with  the  corn  of  Illinois.  She  would  starve  more  quickly, 
far  more  quickly,  than  Belgium ;  so  would  New  York,  so  would 
eastern  Pennsylvania  and  New  Jersey,  but  for  the  supplies 
that  continuously  roll  in  from  the  West. 

Then  came  the  war,  in  which  Germany  sought  to  win  world 
dominion  by  the  simple  plan  of  throwing  the  commerce  of  a  part 
of  Europe  back  a  hundred  years.  She  would  use  the  submarine 
blockade  and  destroy  this  nineteenth  century  world  trade  in 
food  for  Britain  and  France.  The  world  would  then  be  hers. 
If  the  German  plan  had  worked  as  quickly  as  they  hoped,  Eng- 
land might  now  be  a  German  vassal.  Nor  was  America  left 
entirely  out  of  the  plan.  New  England  shares  with  old  England 
the  possibility  of  conquest  by  starvation,  and  such  was  a  part 
of  the  reported  German  plan  for  the  conquest  of  America. 
This  plan  provides  for  bisecting  this  country  along  the  easily 
held  line  that  nature  has  made  by  the  Potomac  River,  the  Blue 
Ridge  Mountains,  the  Susquehanna  and  Hudson  rivers,  with 
the  addition  of  Lake  George  and  Lake  Champlain.  The  map 
shows  how  easy  it  seems. 

In  Europe  we  have  seen  the  continent  cut  in  two  and  the 
starvation  process  working.  In  the  prosperous  times  of  recent 
peace,  England  and  Belgium,  and  to  a  lesser  extent  France  and 
Italy,  lived  like  Massachusetts  and  New  York.  A  steady  pro- 


UNITED  STATES  WAR  FOOD  EXPORTS 


10       .  INTRODUCTION 

cession  of  ships  and  trains  with  wood,  wheat,  oats,  rye,  barley, 
corn,  butter,  eggs,  and  meat  streamed  westward  from  north 
Europe  and  the  White  Sea,  from  middle  Europe  and  the  Baltic 
Sea,  from  southeastern  Europe  and  the  Black  Sea. 

Suddenly  Germany  stopped  it  all.  She  controlled  the  Baltic, 
and  when  she  got  Turkey  into  the  conflict  the  Black  Sea  was 
closed  and  Russia  and  Rumania  were  shut  up  as  tightly  as  the 
United  States  and  Canada  would  be  if  every  Atlantic  port  were 
closed,  every  Gulf  port  closed,  and  every  Pacific  port  closed 
except  San  Diego,  California. 

The  conspicuous  thing  about  America's  foreign  trade  for  ten 
years  before  the  war  was  the  decline  in  the  export  of  food- 
stuffs. Then  suddenly  the  countries  of  western  Europe  were 
cut  off  from  their  other  great  source  of  supply  in  eastern  Eu- 
rope. Next,  the  war  reduced  Allied  home  production.  Con- 
sequently America  had  the  bag  to  fill. 

Another  biting  fact  in  the  early  part  of  1918  was  that  supplies 
of  wheat  and  corn  in  Argentina  and  of  wheat  in  Australia, 
although  paid  for  and  lying  in  the  warehouses,  might  as  well 
have  been  in  the  moon.  There  were  great  piles  of  wheat  lying  in 
Australia,  one  report  put  it  at  two  hundred  million  bushels ;  but 
from  England  to  Australia  by  sea  is  three  times  as  far  as  to 
America.  Ships  to  carry  the  Australian  wheat  did  not  exist. 
Such  ships  as  could  be  found  had  to  be  supplied  almost  exclu- 
sively from  the  short-journey  place — the  United  States,  3,000 
miles — rather  than  Argentina,  6,000  miles,  or  Australia,  10,000 
miles  away.  For  several  years  the  fate  of  the  Great  War  hung 
on  the  Allies'  oversea  food  supply. 

If  the  issue  of  this  war  hung  on  the  question  of  food  supply, 
what  about  the  past?  If  it  is  a  key  to  present  history,  is  it  not 
also  a  key  to  the  past  ?  History  is  like  a  Punch  and  Judy  show. 
The  real  things  are  the  forces  that  work  the  puppets.  An  empty 
stomach  is  not  the  least  of  these,  and  one  to  which  historians 
have  given  too  little  heed.  Huntington  *  claims  that  the  fall 
of  Rome  was  due  to  vast  droughts  in  central  Asia.  The  droughts 
diminished  the  grass  supply.  This  shortage  cut  down  the  flocks 
and  the  food  supply  of  pastoral  peoples.  Should  they  sit  at 
home  and  starve,  or  go  forth  and  fight  their  way  to  new  lands, 

•Huntington,  Ellsworth:  Climate  and  Civilization. 


UNITED  STATES  WAR  FOOD  EXPORTS 


11 


12 


INTRODUCTION 


to  fresh  pastures — the  only  things  they  knew  as  a  source  of 
food?  Of  course  they  chose  action  rather  than  death,  and  so 
they  broke  into  Europe  with  a  power  that  could  not  be  stayed. 
Rome  fell  before  them. 

A  well-known  economist  has  called  the  French  Revolution  a 
bread-riot,  and  the  fall  of  the  Russian  Empire  and  of  Kerensky's 

government  had  many  of 
the  marks  of  being  an- 
other. For  months  the 
Czar's  government  had 
been  handing  out  bread 
every  day  to  the  hungry 
people  in  Petrograd.  One 
day  the  bread-line  waited 
in  vain,  and  the  people 
went  hungry  to  bed.  The 
next  morning  they  started 
to  riot.  The  soldiers  of 
the  Petrograd  garrison 
were  ordered  to  fire  on 
the  mob.  These  soldiers 
happened  to  be  Petrograd 
men,  and  they  did  not 
think  well  of  firing  on 
their  own  kin.  Instead 
of  shooting  the  people, 
their  people,  they  frater- 
nized with  them.  The 
mob  and  the  army  became 
one,  and  Nicholas  was  no 
longer  Czar  of  all  the 
Russias. 

Then  Kerensky  ruled  in 
Petrograd  as  long  as  his 
bread  held  out.  The  soldiers  liked  Kerensky,  they  wanted  to 
stand  by  him,  but  man  must  have  food.  One  morning  the  bread 
did  not  come.  All  day  the  soldiers  waited  for  their  breakfasts. 
They  held1  a  meeting  and  sent  word  to  Kerensky  that  they  would 
give  him  until  7  P.M.  to  deliver  the  bread.  This  he  could  not  do, 


International  Exports  of  "Wheat 


Year  1    191M5    .1915-16     1916-17 


FIG.  6. — The  total  wheat  trade  shows 
the  important  part  played  by  North 
America  in  supplying  food  for  the  war. 
(United  States  Crop  Reporter.) 


FOOD  AND  HISTORY  13 

and  the  army  went  over  to  the  Reds.     Kerensky  followed  the 
Czar. 

The  food  supply  is  the  first  necessity  of  mankind;  and  a 
satisfactory  food  supply  is  a  necessity  of  advancing  civilization : 
for,  as  President  Wilson  recently  put  it,  "  Hunger  does  not 
breed  reform." 


CHAPTER  I 
WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

THE  IMPORTANCE  OF  CEREAL  FOODS 

MOST  of  the  energy  made  in  the  human  machine  comes  from 
starches  and  sugars  (carbohydrates) — mainly  from  starch,  the 
chief  element  in  the  cereal  foods.  Bread  is  the  most  desired  of 
all  the  cereal  products.  Long  ago  it  was  called  the  staff  of  life. 

Wheat  is  the  most  highly  prized  of  all  the  breadstuffs,  not 
because  it  is  the  most  nutritious,  but  because  wheat  bread  tastes 
a  little  better  to  most  people  than  other  breads ;  consequently,  as 
people  become  richer,  they  turn  from  cheaper  and  less  palatable 
breads  to  wheat  bread.  Thus  the  negro  of  the  South  turns  from 
corn  pone  to  the  wheaten  loaf ;  the  German  and  Russian  peasants 
turn  from  the  black  rye  bread  to  the  white  wheat  bread,  and  the 
scantily  clad  West  Indian  leaves  his  yams  and  cassava  cake  for 
the  produce  of  the  Minneapolis  mills. 

Even  the  Chinese  and  Japanese  are  increasing  their  use  of 
wheat  as  a  luxury  to  replace  partially  their  cheaper  foods  of 
barley,  rye,  millet,  and  the  more  expensive  rice. 

All  the  cereals  are  furnished  by  the  grass  family.  We  get 
these  foods  by  taking  the  legacies  that  the  plants  leave  for  their 
children.  The  plants  pack  starch,  gluten,  fats,  and  other  ele- 
ments of  nutrition  into  their  seeds  to  provide  for  the  nourish- 
ment of  the  young  plant  before  it  gets  its  roots  well  into  the 
earth.  Cultivation  has  greatly  increased  the  number  of  seeds  to 
each  plant,  and  we  take  and  eat  the  surplus.  Cereals  are  equally 
acceptable  to  man  and  to  many  beasts,  and  they  are  furnished  to 
man  in  various  lands  by  a  much  greater  variety  of  plants  than 
a  wheat-eating  nation  would  at  first  surmise. 

Professor  Sylvanus  Thompson  estimated  a  few  years  ago  that 
the  number  of  wheat  eaters  in  the  world  was  585,000,000,  or 
more  than  one-third  of'the  human  race,  and  there  is  little  doubt 

14 


NUMBER  OF  WHEAT  EATERS  15 

that  our  wide-reaching  world  trade  and  increasing  wealth  have 
steadily  increased  their  number.  The  year  1918  saw  wheat 
become  a  subject  of  more  intense  human  interest  than  it  had 
ever  been  before.  Most  of  these  hundreds  of  millions  of  wheat- 
eaters  had  taken  their  diet  as  a  matter  6f  course  before  the  war ; 
but,  as  country  after  country  faced  a  reduced  wheat  supply  and 
formal  or  informal  rationing,  tens  of  millons  of  people  found 
a  new  interest  in  the  prospects  for  wheat.  This  emphasis  con- 
tinued until,  when  the  reduced  rations  were  applied  to  the 
United  States  and  Canada,  wheat  became  a  world  interest.  The 
new  conditions  applied  to  all  except  those  few  scattered  groups 
of  humanity  who  lived  beyond  the  reach  of  world  trade  in 
some  far  interior  location,  such  as  the  oases  where  mountain 
streams  run  out  into  the  arid  plains  of  Afghanistan,  or  Turkestan, 
or  Mongolia,  and  help  to  produce  wheat  that  could  not  be  carried 
to  a  seaport  for  several  times  its  value. 

While  important  in  every  locality  where  it  is  used,  wheat 

bread  is  of  varying  importance  in  the  diet  of  different  people. 

To  many  Americans  it  is  merely  a  supplementary  food.     In 

much  of  Europe,  particularly  France  and  parts  of  the  Medi- 

.terranean  countries,  it  is  the  mainstay  of  the  diet. 

THE  WHEAT  PLANT  AND  ITS  REQUIREMENTS 

Wheat  was  grown  by  man  before  the  dawn  of  recorded  history, 
so  long  ago  in  fact  that  for  centuries  the  wild  plant  was  thought 
to  be  extinct,  like  the  wild  sugar-cane.  Botanists  are  still  in 
doubt  as  to  the  claim  that  it  was  found  growing  wild  a  few 
years  ago  by  Mr.  Aaronson  on  the  slopes  of  Mt.  Hermon  in 
Palestine.  It  is  certain,  however,  that  wheat  belongs  in  the 
Palestine  climate.  Wheat  is  primarily,  throughout  the  world,  a 
crop  of  lands  of  little  rain.  Most  of  the  world's  crop  is  grown 
in  regions  having  less  than  thirty  inches  of  rain ;  some  indeed  is 
grown  in  lands  where  the  rainfall  is  only  ten  inches  a  year. 

Fdr  soils  wheat  grows  best  on  silts  and  clays,  and  does  so 
poorly  on  sand  that  little  of  the  world's  supply  is  grown  on 
sandy  soils. 

During  the  first  stage  of  its  growth,  the  wheat  plant,  being 
a  grass,  consists  of  a  tuft  of  green  blades.  Later  it  sends  up 


16 


WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 


stalks  of  straw  that  support  the  grain-bearing  heads.  The  num- 
ber of  stalks  and  heads  depends  on  the  size  and  vigor  of  the 
plant,  and  these  are  greatly  dependent  upon  the  duration  of  cool, 


Fio.  7. — Rainfall,  June,  July,  and  August.      (Mark   S.   W.  Jefferson, 
Teachers'  Geography. ) 
EJSSSJSa   Heavy — more   than    10   inches  of   rain   and  melted   snow   in  the 

three  months. 

j         .|   Light — from  6  to  10  inches  in  the  three  months. 
L— ^— '   Scant — less  than  6  inches  in  the  three  months. 

All  the  great  wheat  regions  are  in  or  along  the  margins  of  the  regions 
of  scant  summer  rain.  It  should  be  noted  that  in  the  southern  hemisphere 
this  map  shows  summer  rain. 

moist  weather.  If  the  cool,  moist  season  of  grass  growth  is  long, 
the  grass-like  development  is  good,  the  roots  are  full  of  nutrition, 
and  the  heads  many.  Early  sunshine  and  heat  that  shorten  the 
damp  period  shorten  the  grain  yield  also.  This  formative  period 


WHEAT  CLIMATE 


17 


is  therefore  important.  In  milder  climates  it  may  include  the 
winter,  for,  like  most  grasses,  wheat  is  not  harmed  by  mere 
freezing;  but  where  the  winter  is  too  severe  the  wheat-growing 
period  falls  wholly  in  the  spring  and  summer.  The  wheat  of 
warmer  regions,  called  winter  wheat,  is  sown  in  the  autumn  and 


FIG.  8. — Note  striking  relationship  between  excessive  temperature  and 
low  yield,  and  low  temperature  and  high  yield,  in  the  Dakotas,  1891-1913. 
This  clearly  explains  why  Nebraska,  farther  to  the  south,  is  not  a  spring 
wheat  region.  (Data  from  United  States  Monthly  Weather  Review, 
January,  1915.) 

harvested  early  in  the  next  summer.  Spring  wheat,  the  wheat 
of  the  lands  of  dry  cold  winter,  is  sown  in  the  spring  and  har- 
vested at  the  end  of  the  summer.  Although  wheat  grows  in  many 
and  widely  scattered  lands  and  different  climates,  it  should  have 
for  the  period  of  its  early  growth  moderate  rainfall  *  with 
rather  cool,  moist  weather,  long-continued  if  possible.  This 

*  The  moisture  left  from  a  period  of  seasonal  rainfall  is  sufficient  in 
some  parts  of  the  Pacific  slope  to  mature  a  crop  of  wheat  upon  which  no 
rain  falls. 


18  WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

should  then  be  followed  by  warm,  bright,  and  preferably  dry 
weather.  Much  summer  rain  is  bad  for  wheat.  It  causes  the 
plant  to  make  straw  rather  than  grain,  and  also  favors  rust 
and  other  fungous  diseases.  If  excessive,  it  causes  the  grain  to 
shrivel  before  harvest,  and  often  causes  it  to  mold  or  decay 
after  harvest.  Consequently,  wheat  growing  cannot  be  tried 
in  warm  regions  of  heavy  summer  rainfall  with  assurance 
of  good  harvest,  and  its  southward  progress  in  the  eastern 
United  States  is  almost  completely  stopped  by  an  average  tem- 
perature of  68°  for  the  two  months  before  harvest. 

There  is  a  wheat  region  on  every  continent.  Despite  its  pro- 
verbial uncertainty  the  weather  follows  certain  laws.  On  each 
side  of  the  equator  lies  the  region  of  the  trade  winds,  blowing 
very  steadily  toward  the  equator:  the  northeast  trades  in  the 
West  Indies,  Mexico,  and  the  Philippines,  and  the  southeast 
trades  in  North  Australia,  Madagascar,  and  Brazil.  In  the 
temperate  latitudes  of  Oregon  and  Ohio,  France  and  Japan, 
Chile  and  New  Zealand,  the  winds  are  prevailingly  from  the 
west,  disturbed  by  days  of  storm.  Between  these  zones  of  the 
trade  winds  which  deluge  the  coasts  with  rain,  and  the  prevailing 
west  winds  which  also  bring  good  rains,  are  belts  of  little  rain, 
giving  to  every  continent  a  belt  of  desert — lower  California 
and  Arizona,  the  Sahara,  Arabia,  Chile,  Kalahari  in  South 
Africa,  and  the  great  wastes  that,  blighting  its  center,  make  Aus- 
tralia a  shell  of  a  continent.  In  the  transition  land  between 
the  trade  wind  deserts  having  very  little  rainfall  and  the  zones 
of  the  west  winds  with  their  much  rain  on  the  other  side,  there 
is  a  place  for  wheat,  so  that  each  one  of  the  six  continents, 
Europe,  Asia,  Africa,  Australia,  North  America,  and  South 
America,  has  one  or  more  wheat  regions.  They  vary  greatly  in 
extent  on  the  different  continents  because  of  the  accidents  of 
land  form  and  land  surface.  There  are  also  wheat  regions  in 
the  zone  of  the  west  winds  and  in  continental  interiors,  as  in 
central  North  America  and  central  Eurasia.  The  map  shows 
eight  important  and  distinct  wheat  regions: 

1.  The  plains  of  southern  Russia  and  the  Danube  Valley. 

2.  The  country  bordering  the  Mediterranean. 

3.  Northwestern  Europe. 

4.  The  central  plains  of  the  United  States  and  Canada. 


WORLD  DISTRIBUTION 


19 


20 


WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 


5.  Columbia  Basin  of  the  United  States. 

6.  Northwestern  India. 

7.  Eastern   Argentina. 

8.  Southern  Australia. 

These  wheat  regions  are  located  in  both  hemispheres  and  in 
climates  that  range  from  the  tropics  of  India  to  the  very  cold 
temperature  of  Alberta  and  Finland,  where  a  little  wheat  grows 
at  65°  N.  As  a  result  of  this  wide  distribution  wheat  is  being 


ACCORDING  TO 


WHEAT 
YIELD   PER  ACRE 


Fio.  10. — An  admirable  illustration  of  the>fact  that  lands  can  have  too 
much  rain  for  wheat.    United  States,  1909.     (Finch  and  Baker.) 

planted  and  harvested  every  month  in  the  year  and  tends  to 
flow  constantly  into  the  world's  granary. 

The  wheat  plant's  double  requirement  of  a  cool,  moist  forma- 
tive period  and  a  warm,  sunny  but  not  hot,  period  of  ripening, 
explains  the  importance  of  wheat  in  regions  of  rainy  winter  and 
dry  summer,  like  California,  Spain,  and  Australia;  and  its  ab- 
sence from  lands  of  heavy  summer  rainfall,  like  the  coasts  of  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico  and  most  tropic  lands.  The  rainfall  of  the 
eastern  and  southern  United  States  promotes  heavy  vegetation, 
permits  a  rich  and  luxuriant  agriculture,  and  is  especially 
adapted  to  the  moisture-loving  cotton  and  corn,  but  is  quite 
unsuitable  for  wheat.  A  ten-year  average  for  Georgia  shows 
7.9  bushels  per  acre,  while  Wisconsin  made  in  the  same  ten  years 
15.7  bushels  per  acre.  Even  the  corn-belt  of  the  Ohio  and  Mis- 
sissippi valleys  has  sufficient  moisture  at  times  to  injure  the 
wheat  crop  to  some  extent,  although  some  wheat  is  grown  in 


WHEAT  AND  SNOW  21 

almost  every  county  in  that  region.  It  is  often  the  case  that  a 
good  corn  season  makes  a  poor  wheat  season.  In  the  cotton- 
belt  with  its  still  greater  summer  rainfall,  so  favorable  for 
cotton,  wheat  becomes  less  and  less  profitable,  and  the  little  that 
is  grown  on  the  northern  margins  of  the  eastern  Gulf  States 
and  in  Carolina  has  the  lowest  yield  per  acre  found  anywhere 
among  English-speaking  peoples.  Early  ripening  varieties  must 
be  used  to  avoid  rust.  A  week's  difference  in  time  of  harvest 
sometimes  reduces  the  yield  ten  or  twelve  bushels.  The  whole 
tropic  and  sub-tropic  region  with  its  tendency  toward  summer 
rain  is,  therefore,  practically  debarred  from  wheat  growing,  ex- 
cept here  and  there  where  some  climatic  exception  holds  sway,  as 
in  Egypt,  arid,  but  having  enough  river  water  for  the  two  needed 
irrigations,  or  again,  where  high  elevation,  as  in  Mexico  and 
Colombia,  gives  temperate  conditions  to  plateaus  and  mountain 
regions,  where  a  little  wheat  is  grown.  The  most  important  of 
these  tropic  exceptions  is  India,  where  the  summer  rains,  brought 
from  the  Indian  Ocean  by  a  great  summer  sea  breeze,  the  mon- 
soon, arrive  after  the  winter  wheat  has  been  ripened  by  the  heat 
and  droughts  of  early  summer,  thus  permitting  India  to  be  one 
of  the  world's  important  wheat  countries. 

FREEZING  AND  THAWING  OP  AN  OPEN  WINTER 

In  addition  to  the  handicap  of  summer  rain,  parts  of  the  corn- 
belt  of  the  United  States  have  another  difficulty  in  the  alternate 
freezing  and  thawing  unaccompanied  by  snow  cover  in  win- 
ter and  early  spring.  This  condition  is  much  worse  than 
solid  and  continuous  freezing.  The  expansion  and  resultant 
lifting  of  the  top  soil  by  freezing,  and  the  contraction  of  the 
thaw,  gradually  shove  ("heave")  the  wheat  plants  out  of  the 
ground.  As  a  result,  wheat  is  a  much  less  important  crop  in 
many  corn-belt  localities  than  it  was  twenty-five  years  ago.  The 
wheat  regions  have  been  shifted  beyond  the  Mississippi  Valley 
southwestward,  to  a  less  frosty  climate  for  winter  wheat,  and 
also  to  the  colder  Red  River  Valley  of  the  North  and  to  the  plains 
of  Canada,  where  the  rigors  of  the  winter  climate  have  no  direct 
effect  upon  the  wheat  because  it  is  spring  sown.  Between  the 
spring  wheat-belt  of  South  Dakota  and  the  winter  wheat-belt  of 


22 


WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 


Kansas  is  a  transition  territory  in  northern  Nebraska  that  is 
too  warm  in  summer  for  good  winter  wheat  and  where  the 
winter  so  often  injures  the  crop  that  it  is  of  much  smaller 
importance  than  in  either  of  the  more  favored  localities  to  the 


FIG.  11. — United  States  production  of  wheat  per  capita,  by  states. 
Wheat  figures,  three-year  average,  1909-11.  Pop.,  1910.  Compare  with 
rainfall  map.  Note  emphasis  of  belt  of  low  rainfall  from  Texas  to 
Dakota,  also  in  Washington  and  Idaho.  Another  illustration  of  the  fact 
that  lands  can  have  too  much  rain  for  wheat.  (Finch  and  Baker.) 

north  or  south  of  it.  For  example,  in  the  winter  of  1917-18 
eighty-three  per  cent,  of  the  3,643,000  acres  of  winter  wheat  in 
Nebraska  was  so  injured  that  it  had  to  be  plowed  up  and  the 
land  put  to  some  other  crop  the  next  season. 

The  ideal  winter  for  wheat  is  that  of  southern  California  and 
Spain,  moist,  with  occasional  frosts  but  no  frozen  ground.  The 
second-best  winter  for  winter  wheat  is  that  of  Ontario  or  cen- 
tral Germany,  where  the  cold  is  almost  continuous,  and  the 
protecting  snow  wraps  the  wheat  in  a  blanket  for  many  weeks, 
finally  melting  and  giving  plenty  of  water  for  spring  growth. 


WHEAT  AND  RAINFALL 


23 


.5 
o 


24  WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

REGIONS  WITH  GOOD  WHEAT  CLIMATE 

The  ideal  wheat  climate,  with  the  rainy  winter  and  dry  sum- 
mer, is  sometimes  called  the  Mediterranean  type  of  climate  be- 
cause it  prevails  in  most  countries  facing  the  Mediterranean  Sea. 
This  Mediterranean  wheat  climate  is  to  be  found  upon  the 
margins  of  the  six  arid  or  desert  regions  that  afflict  each  of  the 
six  continents  in  the  latitude  of  transition  between  the  zones  of 
trade  wind  and  prevailing  westerly  wind.  Thus  we  find  drought 
along  the  northern  edge  of  the  Old  World  desert  from  Gibraltar 
through  southern  Europe,  northern  Africa,  and  Arabia,  and  on 
both  sides  of  the  desert  in  Syria,  Persia,  Siberia,  India,  and 
China.  We  find  it  again  in  South  America,  where  the  desert 
extends  diagonally  from  Peru  through  northern  Chile  into 
western  Argentina  and  is  bordered  by  a  wheat  region  on  the 
west  in  central  Chile  and  on  the  east  in  eastern  Argentina, 
extending  into  Uruguay.  Wheat  lands  border  the  cooler  edges 
of  the  deserts  of  South  Africa  and  Australia,  but  the  desert 
encroaches  upon  the  wheat  lands  so  far  that  these  regions  are 
unimportant  to  the  world's  supply.  South  Africa  with  its  scanty 
population  even  now  imports  wheat,  and  in  Australia  the  mois- 
ture suffices  only  in  the  southeastern,  southern,  and  extreme 
southwestern  sections,  and  the  crop  varies  greatly  with  the  fluc- 
tuating rainfall  on  this  desert  margin.  New  Zealand  is  a  regu- 
lar wheat-exporting  country  because  its  location,  a  little  nearer 
the  south  pole  than  Australia,  misses  the  belt  of  scanty  rainfall 
which  roughly  follows  the  tropics  of  Cancer  and  Capricorn. 
New  Zealand  receives  instead  the  regular  rains  brought  by  the 
west  wind.  Australia  gets  the  same  amount  of  rain  as  southern 
California,  and  New  Zealand  the  same  amount  as  Washington 
State.  Like  England,  in  a  similar  latitude  and  climate,  New 
Zealand  has  a  splendid  wheat  yield  per  acre,  about  thirty  bushels, 
in  contrast  to  the  ten  or  twelve  bushels  of  southern  Australia. 

In  the  United  States,  also,  the  wheat  regions  are  distributed 
according  to  the  same  conditions.  Most  of  the  western  part 
(about  thirty  to  forty-five  per  cent,  of  the  whole)  is  too  arid 
for  cultivation,  except  when  irrigated.  The  district  of  greatest 
aridity  is  in  the  Great  Basin  of  Nevada  and  southeastern  Cali- 
fornia, where  rainfall  is  sometimes  absent  for  a  whole  year  and 


UNITED  STATES  WHEAT 


25 


26  WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

the  average  of  two  or  three  inches  is  the  same  as  that  of  the 
greater  part  of  the  Sahara.  Those  parts  of  California  having 
enough  rain  for  wheat  developed  an  important  wheat  crop  in 
a  few  decades  after  settlement.  The  wheat  crops  of  the  Great 
Valley  of  California  were  world-famous  for  a  time. 

Going  from  the  east  toward  the  arid  region  we  find  the  most 
important  wheat-belt  in  America  reaching  from  Texas  north 
through  Oklahoma,  Kansas,  Nebraska,  the  Dakotas,  and  Minne- 
sota into  Canada.  The  rainfall  of  this  belt  ranges  from  less 
than  20  inches  at  the  north  to  30  inches  in  Texas,  where  the 
evaporation  is  greater.  A  second  belt  is  found  as  we  emerge 
from  the  deserts  of  the  Great  Basin  into  regions  of  greater  rain 
on  the  west,  northwest,  and  north.  On  the  north  and  north- 
west of  these  deserts  of  the  Great  Basin  are  the  fine  wheat  areas 
of  eastern  Oregon  and  Washington.  The  Mediterranean  con- 
ditions of  the  Pacific  States  give  them,  where  they  have  enough 
rain,  the  best  wheat-yielding  climate  in  America.  It  should  be 
pointed  out  that  the  highest  priced  wheat  is  from  the  spring 
wheat-belt. 

In  that  part  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  north  of  Nebraska,  and 
in  its  continuation  in  the  plains  of  western  Canada,  the  winter 
is  too  cold  for  fall-sown  (winter)  wheat,*  especially  as  there  is 
no  good  snow  cover;  but  a  fortunate  rainfall  distribution  that 
permits  the  planting  of  wheat  in  the  spring.  The  rather  light 
rainfall  (fifteen  to  twenty  inches)  reaches  the  maximum  in  early 
summer  or  midsummer,  and  promotes  the  grassy  growth  of  wheat. 
The  wheat  then  ripens  in  the  drier  late  summer.  This  distribu- 
tion makes  the  plains  in  the  center  of  North  America  one  of 
the  most  promising  granaries  of  the  twentieth  century.  But 
the  promise  of  great  production  in  the  next  decades  is  due  rather 
to  great  area  than  to  perfection  of  climate.  Parts  of  interior 
Washington  have  a  better  wheat  climate  than  the  spring  wheat 
country,  where  the  weather  often  makes  the  yield  poor,  despite 
good  work  by  man.  But  this  spring  wheat  country  has  many 
times  the  area  of  the  Washington  State  belt. 

The  close  relation  of  wheat  growing  to  rainfall  is  shown  in  the 
region  of  the  Great  Plains,  which  lies  between  the  winter  rain 

*  No  known  variety  of  winter  wheat  can  stand  the  severe,  dry,  and  often 
snowleaa  freezing  of  North  Dakota,  but  such  varieties  may  come. 


WHEAT  AND  DROUGHT 


27 


FIG.  14. — Tliis  chart  shows,  for  the  United  States  east  of  the  Rocky 
Mountains,  the  number  of  times  in  the  twenty-year  period,  1805  to  1914 
inclusive,  that  precipitation  to  the  amount  of  0.25  inch  in  24  hours  did 
not  occur  for  a  period  of  thirty  consecutive  days  or  more,  for  the  season 
March  1  to  Septeml>er  30,  inclusive.  Lines  show  the  total  number  of 
drought  periods  for  the  twenty  years.  This  remarkable  map  shows  clearly 
why  agriculture  going  westward  across  the  United  States  was  checked 
at  about  the  100th  meridian  in  Kansas.  The  contrast  in  droughts  between 
the  eastern  and  western  ends  of  that  state  explains  why  the  east  is  good 
corn-belt  and  the  western  end  a  land  for  experimental  dry  farming  and 
cattle  ranches.  (  \nti<iiinl  Weather  and  Crop  Bulletin,  U.  S.  Dept.  Agr. ) 

climate  of  the  Columbia  Basin  and  Pacific  Coast,  and  the  mid- 
summer rain  type  of  the  Red  River  Valley.     Midway  between 


28  WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

these  two  there  is  a  transition  belt  in  which  the  maximum  rain 
falls  in  spring  and  early  summer,  so  that  with  the  cool  climate  of 
the  high  plains,  fall-sown  wheat  does  better  than  spring-sown, 
because  the  rains  of  May  and  June  and  early  July  stop  just  in 
time  for  the  wheat  to  ripen  in  July  and  early  August.  The 
milder  winters  are  also  a  factor.  Thus,  while  eastern  Montana 
is  in  the  spring  wheat  country,  western  Montana  is  in  the  winter 
wheat-belt,  as  is  all  the  rest  of  the  Great  Plains  southward 
to  the  Arkansas  River,  at  which  point  recent  tests  with  wheat 
have  failed. 

The  very  close  dependence  of  wheat  upon  rain  is  shown  by 
the  yields  on  the  experimental  farm  of  the  United  States  Depart- 
ment of  Agriculture  near  Cheyenne,  Wyoming,  where  at  an 
elevation  of  6,000  feet  the  crops  and  rainfall  showed  the  follow- 
ing surprising  relations : 

1913  1914  1915 

Rainfall 

April-July  7.14  6.55  10.16 

Winter  wheat  yield       9.3  7.8  37.6 

Europe  shows  a  climatic  distribution  of  wheat-belts  much  like 
that  of  the  United  States.  Near  the  Atlantic,  where  the  rainfall 
is  abundant  as  in  Pennsylvania  and  France,  winter  wheat  pre- 
vails. The  counterpart  of  the  North  American  spring  wheat  area 
is  found  in  the  drier  interior  which,  like  most  continental  in- 
teriors, has  summer  rain.  The  Eurasian  spring  wheat-belt  begins 
in  Rumania,  and  becomes  very  important  just  north  of  Odessa, 
whence  it  swings  off  in  aij  unbroken  stretch  to  the  northeastward 
across  the  basins  of  the  Volga  and  the  upper  Ural  River  to  the 
Ural  Mountains,  and  beyond  them  across  Siberia,  until  wheat- 
growing  possibilities  end  with  the  rough  country  of  the  moun- 
tains beyond  Lake  Baikal.  This  region  has  the  winter  of  North 
Dakota — cold,  windy,  dry,  with  little  snow.  As  North  America 
has  a  winter  wheat-belt  south  of  the  spring  wheat-belt,  so  south- 
eastern Russia  has  a  winter  wheat-belt  north  of  the  Caucasus 
Mountains  and  due  east  of  the  Sea  of  Azov,  reaching  from  that 
body  of  water  to  the  Caspian  Sea. 


MECHANISM  AND  SUPPLY  29 


EFFECT  OF  THE  GRADUAL  REDUCTION  PROCESS  OF  MILLING  UPON 
WHEAT  GROWING 

Spring  wheat  is  comparatively  new  in  the  world  market.  In 
America  it  had  to  await  two  mechanical  developments:  first, 
transportation  to  bring  the  produce  of  continental  interiors  to 
the  sea ;  and  second,  the  perfection  of  a  process  of  milling  that 
permitted  the  making  of  acceptable  flour  out  of  the  unusually 
hard  and  brittle  grain.  The  wheat  crops  of  western  Europe 
and  of  the  eastern  United  States  had  always  been  sown  in  the 
fall  and  harvested  at  the  beginning  of  summer.  These  varieties 
are  starchy  and  soft.  The  spring-sown  wheat  of  central  North 
America,  chiefly  the  Red  Fyfe,  is  so  hard  and  so  brittle  that  the 
husk  breaks  into  little  particles,  so  that  for  many  years  the 
flour  made  from  it  had  a  mixture  of  brown  bran  particles, 
and  was  therefore  dark  in  color.  This  flour  was  not  wanted 
because  of  the  American's  quite  irrational  preference  for  white, 
very  white,  bread.  So  it  was  said  that  spring  wheat  made 
poor  flour,  and  it  therefore  brought  poor  prices,  and  the  lands 
upon  which  it  was  grown  were  in  low  esteem.  The  discovery 
of  the  gradual  reduction  process  of  milling  with  steel  rollers 
made  of  this  despised  grain  the  most  prized  flour,*  and  gave  to 
the  northern  country  a  great  wheat  boom  which,  in  the  last 
quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century,  caused  a  migration  of  wheat 
growers,  the  shifting  of  wheat  growing,  and  the  rapid  growth 
of  population  in  Minnesota  and  the  Dakotas  and,  in  the  first 
decade  of  the  twentieth  century,  caused  large  gains  in  western 
Canada.  This  northwestern  movement  of  people  for  purposes  of 
wheat  growing  will  doubtless  continue  for  decades  to  come. 
After  a  century  of  westward  movement,  wheat  growing,  like  the 
centers  of  human  power,  has  started  northward. 

*  The  old-fashioned  mills  in  which  men  had  for  ages  ground  their 
wheat,  put  the  grain  between  two  revolving  stones  and  crushed  it  up. 
This  splintered  the  hard  husk  of  spring  wheat.  The  roller  process 
merely  presses  the  grain  between  two  steel  rollers.  A  few  particles  of 
white  flour  fall  out;  the  grain  is  then  bolted  and  run  through  other 
rollers  and  again  bolted.  The  process  is  repeated  many  times  until 
finally  the  white  flour  has  been  completely  separated  from  the  torn,  but 
unpulverized  husk. 


30  WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

EFFECT   OF   MACHINERY   IN   WHEAT   PRODUCTION 

The  methods  of  producing  wheat  have  been  made  much 
cheaper  and  easier  by  mechanical  inventions.  Eighteenth  cen- 
tury wheat  was  cut  in  the  Scriptural  way,  by  a  sickle  held  by 
the  laborer  in  one  hand,  while  he  grasped  a  few  heads  of  wheat 
in  the  other.  Then  came  the  cradle,  invented  in  New  England 
in  1806.  This  is  a  kind  of  scythe  (the  scythe  was  invented  at 
Lynn,  Massachusetts,  in  1655)  provided  with  fingers  to  catch 
and  throw  into  an  even  row  the  straw  it  cuts.  The  cradle  was 
the  main  implement  used  in  the  United  States  through  the  first 
half  of  the  nineteenth  century.  In  1851  Cyrus  McCormick  of 
Virginia  made  a  reaper  which  cut  and  dropped  the  grain  in 
bundles  to  be  bound  by  hand.  Then  in  rapid  succession  came 
the  reapers  that  also  tie  the  bundles,  and  finally  the  reapers  that 
carry  the  bundles  and  drop  them  in  piles  where  the  shocks  are 
to  be  made.  One  of  these  machines  with  three  horses  and  a 
driver,  has  no  difficulty  in  performing  as  much  work  as  was 
done  fifty  years  ago  by  from  five  to  seven  men  working  ardu- 
ously with  cradles,  rakes,  and  hands.  As  wheat  cutting  is  now 
merely  the  driving  of  horses  and  the  adjusting  of  levers  on  the 
harvesting  machine,  the  work  is  occasionally  done  by  women. 
Bone-dry  summers,  such  as  occur  in  the  Columbia  Kiver  basin 
and  the  Great  Valley  of  California,  permit  the  combined  har- 
vester and  thrasher  to  put  into  sacks  each  day  the  thoroughly 
dry  grain  of  thirty  or  more  acres  of  waving  wheat  fields. 

Similar  improvements  have  been  made  in  thrashing,  which 
is  an  equally  important  part  of  wheat  production.  Men  are 
still  living  in  the  United  States  who  in  their  youth  helped 
thrash  by  driving  horses  around  and  around  upon  the  sheaves 
that  their  hoofs  might  shatter  out  the  grains  upon  the  thrash- 
ing floor.  A  method  similar  to  this,  in  which  the  horses 
drag  a  rolling  stone  around  the  thrashing  floor,  is  still  in 
use  in  Russia,  Turkey,  and  other  countries  adjacent  to  the 
Black  and  Mediterranean  seas.*  A  flail  may  still  be  found 

*  These  floors  are  often  unroofed,  and  by  Turkish  law  the  grain  cannot 
be  moved  from  them  until  the  tax  gatherer  comes.  Meanwhile  birds,  beasts, 
and  weather  injure  the  wheat.  A  bribe,  if  sufficiently  large,  may  induce 
the  tax  gatherer  to  hurry.  This  instance  is  typical  of  the  many  ways  in 
which  the  Turkish  government  or  rather  misgovernment  limits  industry. 


THE  STEAM  THRASHER 


32  WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

hanging  in  many  a  New  England  barn.  It  may  seem  hard 
to  believe,  but  the  Arab  on  the  desert's  edge  in  Africa  or 
western  Asia  still  sometimes  plucks  his  wheat  or  barley  by 
hand  and  lets  his  women  beat  out  the  grain  with  a  stick,  pre- 
paratory to  grinding  it  in  a  stone  hand  mill  to  make  a  precious 
and  (in  terms  of  human  labor)  very  high-priced  loaf.  In  more 
progressive  regions,  under  the  influence  of  high  wages  for  labor, 


FIG.  16. — Arabs  in  Tunis  harvesting  wheat  by  primitive  methods  pre- 
paratory to  thrashing  it  under  the  feet  of  camels.  The  Bedouin  is  little 
influenced  by  our  machine  industry.  His  society  is  perhaps  the  oldest 
enduring  society  on  earth. 

the  steam  thrasher  does  nearly  all  the  work.  In  the  United 
States,  it  is  common  for  one  of  these  outfits  to  thrash  a  thou- 
sand bushels  of  wheat  per  day  and  be  taken  at  evening  to  the 
next  farm  by  the  traction  engine  that  runs  the  thrasher.  These 
revolutionary  improvements  in  wheat  production  have  cheapened 
its  labor  cost  from  133  minutes  of  human  labor  per  bushel  in 
1830  to  ten  minutes  in  1904.*  Travelers  recently  returned  from 
the  interior  of  northern  China  report  the  natives  to  be  growing 
and  thrashing  wheat  by  laborious  hand  methods  that  would  have 
made  the  product  cost  $4  or  $5  a  bushel  in  the  United  States 
*  Year  Book,  Department  of  Agriculture,  1910. 


REMOTE  WHEAT  FIELDS  83 

in  1914.  Sometimes  they  pull  up  the  grain  by  hand  and  take 
it  to  the  barn,  cut  off  the  roots  to  be  rotted  in  compost  heaps 
for  fertilizer,  and  then  thrash  the  grain  by  hand. 

The  cheapening  that  results  from  the  easier  production  per- 
mits wheat  to  become  more  universally  used  as  food.  The 
machinery  for  planting,  harvesting,  and  thrashing  wheat  has 
also  been  adopted,  with  minor  changes,  to  do  the  same  work  for 
the  other  small  grains — rye,  oats,  barley,  and  buckwheat. 

In  considering  the  use  of  machinery  for  making  a  cheaper 
wheat  and  bread,  we  should  not  overlook  the  transport  services 
rendered  by  the  efficient  ocean  steamer  and  the  railroad.  It  is 
only  by  the  improvement  of  the  locomotive  that  such  places  as 
western  Canada  and  Montana  can  be  made  effective  in  contrib- 
uting to  the  world's  supply  of  bread.  Eighty  years  ago  a  loco- 
motive weighed  ten  tons ;  fifty  years  ago  it  weighed  forty  tons ; 
now  in  some  instances  it  weighs  400  tons,  and  must  come  at  least 
as  close  as  thirty  miles  to  the  wheat  field,  for  that  thirty  miles 
seems  to  be  the  practical  limit  for  hauling  by  farmers'  horses 
and  wagons,  even  on  the  level  prairies  of  western  Canada.  Be- 
yond that  distance  from  the  railroad  the  prairie  is  still  an 
unbroken  turf,  of  value  only  to  the  pasturing  animals  which 
can  carry  themselves  long  distances  to  the  railway  stations. 
The  influence  of  transportation  on  the  bread  supply  is  well 
shown  in  parts  of  Persia  where,  300  miles  from  the  capital,  wheat 
sometimes  sells  for  as  low  as  $1.00  American  gold  for  650  pounds, 
and  crops  rot  because  there  is  no  way  of  getting  a  surplus  to 
market  across  the  arid  plain  which  surrounds  some  rich  oasis. 
At  the  same  time  wheat  in  Teheran,  the  capital,  may  bring  $10.00 
for  650  pounds,  a  much  greater  difference  in  price  than  that  be- 
tween the  price-setting  market  of  London  and  the  most  remote 
railway  station  receiving  wheat  for  the  world's  market.  This 
farthest  point  happens  to  be  in  eastern  Idaho.  Remoteness  is 
here  measured  by  price,  and  price  in  turn  is  regulated  by  freight 
rates.  Eastern  Idaho  is  on  a  traffic  divide.  Freight  rates  are 
the  same  in  each  direction.  The  farmer  there  may  ship  his 
wheat  by  rail  to  a  Pacific  port,  to  a  Gulf  port,  or  to  a  Lake  port, 
at  any  one  of  which  ports  it  may  slide  into  the  hold  of  a 
steamer,  the  cheap  carrier  of  peace  times.  In  every  direction 
from  this  central  point  in  eastern  Idaho  the  average  price  of 


34. 


WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 


wheat  rises,  being  on  the  average  fifteen  cents  per  bushel  higher 
in  central  Washington,  and  thirty  cents  higher  at  Chicago.* 


FIG  17 — Russian  thrashing  floor  of  type  common  in  eastern  Medi- 
terranean countries.  The  grooved  stone  rolls  after  the  horse  and  shatters 
the  grain  from  the  straw  The  man  throws  the  straw  out  with  a  fork. 
The  grain  may  be  separated  from  the  chaff  by  winnowing  in  the  wind. 


YIELD    AND    PRODUCTION    OF    WHEAT    IN    NEW    COUNTRIES 

The  yield  of  wheat  varies  greatly  in  different  parts  of  the 
world  because  of  the  combined  influences  of  climate,  knowledge, 
and  farm  economics.  Farm  economics,  which  is  for  America 
really  a  new  science,  has  more  influence  than  many  people  think. 
It  is  a  peculiar  fact  that  the  world's  greatest  wheat  exports  come 
from  regions  that  have  comparatively  low  yield  per  acre,  and  that 
have  not  the  ideal  wheat  climate.  (See  Table  of  "Wheat  Trade 
and  Production,  p.  42).  For  wheat  is  a  good  frontiersman's 
crop.  With  the  aid  of  modern  machinery  and  transportation 
wheat  is  a  "money  crop"  (one  readily  turned  into  cash)  easily 
grown  on  treeless  frontiers  of  agriculture  such  as  Kansas,  Mani- 

*  S«P  Bulletin  504,  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture. 


VALUE  AS  MONEY  CROP  35 

toba,  and  Argentina.  It  keeps  well,  is  easily  shipped,  is  in  uni- 
versal demand.  It  is  of  more  value  in  proportion  to  its  bulk 
than  hay  or  any  other  grain  save  rice.  It  grows  well  in  a 
greater  variety  of  places  than  corn,  oats,  or  rye.  When  it  is 
safely  sheltered  near  a  railroad,  it  can  be  marketed  many  months 
later,  many  thousands  of  miles  away.  For  decades  it  has  regu- 
larly been  carried  from  Puget  Sound  via  Cape  Horn  and  from 
South  Australia  via  Cape  of  Good  Hope  to  Liverpool,  fully 
half-way  round  the  globe.  These  advantages  of  wheat  often 
make  it  the  first  and  most  profitable  grain  that  can  be  grown  by 
the  new  settler  upon  an  open  plain  after  the  railroad  is  within 
reach,  even  though  the  average  yield  per  acre  be  low.*  Scanty 
population  marks  most  of  the  world's  wheat  export  regions — 
central  North  America,  Columbia  Basin,  Argentina,  Australia, 
southeast  Russia.  As  the  last  half  century  has  been  an  epoch 
of  settlement  and  railroad  building,  the  world's  chief  wheat 
exports  for  that  period  have  come  from  such  newly  accessible 
plains:  in  the  Mississippi,  Missouri,  and  Red  River  valleys  of 
the  United  States;  in  western  Canada,  Argentina,  Australia, 
Russia,  and  Siberia.  Owing  to  the  fact  that  there  is  no  rival  cul- 
tivated crop,  the  settler  on  a  new  plain,  if  not  a  tender  of  flocks 
and  herds,  usually  grows  wheat  year  after  year  as  long  as  the 
yield  is  at  all  profitable.  Illinois  and  Iowa  have  passed  through 
this  exploitation  or  continuous  cropping  stage,  which  prevails  at 
the  present  time  on  some  of  the  more  newly  settled  lands  of  cen- 
tral Kansas,  Nebraska,  Dakota,  and  Saskatchewan.  The  Red 
River  Valley  of  the  North,  comprising  the  better  part  of  the 
wheat  districts  of  Minnesota,  North  Dakota,  and  Manitoba,  like 
the  black  earth  districts  of  southern  Russia,  is  now  experiencing 
decline  in  yield  and  is  approaching  the  end  of  its  continuous 
wheat  production.  With  the  possible  exception  of  the  Russian 
black  earth  belt  there  never  was  in  the  whole  world  an  easier 
place  to  grow  wheat  than  in  the  Red  River  country.  This  fertile 
plain,  the  bed  of  a  glacial  lake,  often  for  miles  literally  as  flat 
as  a  floor,  without  a  stone  or  tree,  lends  itself  perfectly  to  the 
use  of  the  most  complicated  machinery  and  large-scale  produc- 

*  The  distribution  of  the  world's  wheat  crop  is  a  fine  illustration  of  the 
fact  that  products  art-  often  grown  in  places  that  are  not  best  suited  to 
them.  This  unsuitability  may  not  prevent  the  crop  from  being  the  beat 
thing  to  grow  on  these  lands. 


36  WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

tion.  Year  after  year  wheat  has  been  grown  until  the  declining 
yield  and  the  rising  prices  of  meat  have  made  the  farmers  turn 
to  other  pursuits — the  raising  of  horses,  the  keeping  of  cattle,  the 
making  of  butter.  The  total  yield  from  these  districts  does  not 
decline  because  of  the  steadily  increased  area  that  is  planted 
with  wheat  in  the  one-crop  period  and  the  improved  yields  that 
follow  the  introduction  of  crop  rotation  and  livestock. 

At  the  present  time  in  western  Canada,  where  new  railroads 
have  for  two  decades  been  building  across  open,  empty,  treeless 
plains,  the  new  settlers  are  again  beginning  with  continuous 
wheat  growing  which  will  last  them  one,  two,  or  three  decades 
before  they  too  must  take  to  other  crops  and  to  cattle  keeping, 
as  do  their  neighbors  who  have  been  longer  on  the  land.  In 
the  meantime  these  wheat  yields  on  the  virgin  prairie  soil 
of  Canada's  harvest  frontier  are  larger  than  those  of  the  Red 
River  Valley.  It  is  possible  that  the  Canadian  region  suitable 
for  wheat  growing  reaches  to  60°  north,  and  extends  from  Lake 
Winnipeg  to  the  Rockies.  If  experience  proves  this  to  be  true, 
the  wheat-growing  possibilities  are  enormous,  and  the  continuous 
cropping  method  will  have  land  to  support  it  for  several  decades 
longer. 

The  Italian  farmers  who  went  to  Argentina  at  the  rate  of 
100,000  per  year  before  the  Great  War  are  having  a  similar 
experience  upon  the  magnificent  black  soil  plains  that  lie  along 
the  western  banks  of  the  Parana  River.  The  only  difference  is 
that  they  have  to  rent  the  land.  The  Russian  peasant  also 
exploits  the  land  in  the  same  way  when  he  emigrates  to  cen- 
tral Siberia  and  settles  on  those  endless  plains  called  steppes 
where  now  the  trans-Siberian  railroad  has  made  possible  the 
export  of  grain.  After  a  time  these  Siberians  also  must  rotate 
crops,  keep  cattle,  and  export  butter  and  eggs  to  London,  as  did 
their  brethren  in  the  older  and  more  developed  lands  of  Russia 
and  western  Siberia  before  the  German  blockade  put  a  temporary 
end  to  this  natural  movement  of  food. 


RARITY  OF  SURPLUS 


37 


Surplus                                                       Deficit 

§999999                           9            Q           Q             Q 

888888                  8888 
§        §        §        §        §        §        §                 §        §        §        § 

R        S 

>              Q              t 
y            35            " 

?     8      a      s"     -=,      s 

i        $        8         9 

Washington 
California 

— 

N.Dakota 

Minnesota 
Wisconsin 

H 

Iowa 

Moor  V/wV 

AN  ts  w   i  ur& 

i  Qnnsylvania 

Ohio 

m 

Massachusetts 

HB 

mam 

Maine 

• 

New  Hampshire 

• 

Vermont 

| 

Rhode  Island 

• 

Connecticut 

•1 

New  Jersey 

••• 

• 

Delaware 

i 

Maryland 

i 

Virginia 

1 

West  Virginia 

•i 

N.Carolina 

•1 

S.Carolina 

•M 

Georgia 

••• 

Florida 

• 

Indiana 

• 

mmm 

Illinois 

I 

Michigan 

1 

Missouri 

• 

mmm 

S.Dakota 

XT  iVtwi  a\rn 

— 

•«• 

mm 

.NeorasKa 
Kentucky 

, 

Tennessee 

1 

Alabama 

••• 

Mississippi 

•• 

Louisiana 

EBB 

Texas 

•Mi 

• 

Oklahoma 

i 

••i 

Arkansas 

•a 

Montana 

i 

••i 

Wyoming 

i 

Colorado 

• 

New  Mexico 

I 

Arizona 

i 

Utah 

• 

Nevada 

i 

Idaho 

i 

BOH 

Oregon 

• 

••• 

FlG.  18. — The  states  having  substantial  wheat  surplus  are  surprisingly 

few,  1910-14. 


38  WHEAT:  REGIONS  AND  PRODUCTION 

WHEAT  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

In  addition  to  being  important  on  the  frontier,  wheat  is  also 
important  for  several  reasons  in  regions  of  established  crop  rota- 
tions and  mixed  farming.  It  affords  an  easy  way  to  start  pasture 
and  hay  fields  because  the  young  grass  sown  in  the  wheat  can 
grow  up  as  the  wheat  grows,  the  wheat  serving  as  a  nurse  crop. 
Wheat  fits  well  into  the  seasonal  distribution  of  work.  Among 
keepers  of  livestock  the  straw  is  valuable  for  bedding  for  the 
animals.  Wheat  thus  becomes  important  in  the  systematic 
farming  of  Pennsylvania  or  England  and  also  in  the  semi-garden 
agriculture  of  Belgium,  where  great  care  and  labor  make  produc- 
tion large.  Europe,  with  extensive  spring  wheat-growing  areas 
in  Russia  and  Rumania,  and  intensive  winter  wheat  areas  in 
western  Europe,  thus  becomes  by  far  the  first  wheat  grower 
among  the  continents,  producing  more  and  also  eating  more  in 
normal  times  than  all  the  rest  of  the  world  combined. 

EFFECT  OF  CHEAP  WHEAT  ON  FARM  VALUE  IN  OLD  COUNTRIES 

The  new  lands  upon  the  plains  of  North  America  and  other 
continents  were  recently  opened  for  settlement  by  the  construc- 
tion of  railroads,  and  often  were  actually  given  away.  This 
giving  away  of  land  is  still  going  on  in  western  Canada.  For 
the  last  decade  before  the  Great  War  the  Canadian  Govern- 
ment actually  begged  people  to  come  and  take  land  for  nothing ; 
and  the  Canadian  Minister  of  the  Interior  maintained  offices 
in  foreign  countries,  including  one  in  New  York  State,  to 
"sell"  this  free  land.  For  years  he  has  actually  run  paid 
advertisements  in  American  farm  papers'  urging  the  young 
men  of  America  to  come  to  western  Canada  and  get  160  acres 
of  rich  and  level  prairie  for  the  taking.  It  is  true  that  the 
level  prairie  thus  to  be  had  for  the  taking  is  twenty  to  thirty 
miles  back  from  the  railroad,  for  the  unused  land  near 
the  railroad  was  already  in  the  hands  of  speculators.  This 
free  land  is  bleak,  windy,  and  often  quite  treeless,  but  it  is 
fertile,  arable,  and  fit  to  become  the  seat  of  empire.  The  same 
movement  has  of  course  been  going  on  for  three  centuries  on 
the  western  edge  of  settlement  in  the  United  States.  It  has 


LOW  YIELD  AND  LOW  COST  39 

progressed  more  rapidly  since  the  frontier  passed  the  forest 
belt  and  the  railroads  shot  across  the  open  prairies  with  the 
settler  ever  skirmishing  ahead.  The  production  of  wheat  is 
therefore  a  much  cheaper  process  in  these  lands  than  in  Eu- 
rope, where  rent  or  interest  on  land  value  is  high.  Wheat 
production,  made  easy  by  the  new  machinery,  became  so  cheap, 
especially  during  the  later  years  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
that  it  was  no  longer  profitable  to  grow  wheat  on  much  of  the 
land  in  the  eastern  United  States  and  western  Europe,  par- 
ticularly Great  Britain,  where  it  had  long  been  the  mainstay  as 
a  money  crop.  Thus  the  United  Kingdom,  which  had  four  mil- 
lion acres  in  wheat  in  1869,  planted  less  than  half  as  much  in 
1910,  and  had  reduced  the  area  of  wheat  production  to  11.5 
per  cent,  of  her  total  cultivated  area.  Animal  products  were 
cheapened  by  the  same  forces.  Accordingly  land  values  fell  in 
both  regions.  Many  farms  were  and  still  are  abandoned  in  New 
England  and  New  York  and  eastern  Canada,  while  many  thou- 
sands more  throughout  the  North  Atlantic  slope  even  in  1914 
would  sell  for  less  than  they  were  worth  before  there  was  a  mile 
of  railroad  in  America.  New  York  State  produced  twelve  mil- 
lion bushels  of  wheat  in  1839  and  six  million  in  1909.  England 
went  through  the  same  experience.  Flocks  of  fine  sheep  and 
herds  of  fat  cattle  cropped  rich  grass  in  1900  in  fields  that  had 
waved  green  and  gold  with  wheat  in  1800  and  in  1870. 


CHAPTER  II 
WHEAT:   TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND   PROSPECTS 


COMPARISON  OF  CROP  AND  YIELD  IN  EUROPE  AND  AMERICA 

AMERICA  is  such  a  heavy  exporter  of  wheat  that  it  is  somewhat 
surprising  to  learn  that  Europe  produces  much  more  wheat  to 
the  acre  and  more  wheat  altogether  than  America  or  even  the 
rest  of  the  world,  as  the  figures  for  1911-13  clearly  show. 


1911  1912  1913 

Europe                         1805.6  1931.3  2276.2 

N.  America                   864.3  966.4  1005.1 

Entire  world              3551.8  3791.9  4124.9 


Average 

2004.3        mil.  bu. 
945.2 
3822.8 


Europe  and  the  United  States  do  not  differ  greatly  in  size,  but 
one  has  105  million  people  and  the  other  420  million.     In  order 


WHEAT     PRODUCTION    AND  CONSUMPTION   IN  EUROPE 
AND  IN  THE  REST  OF  THE  WORLD 


tILUOMS  OF  BUSHELS 


PRODUCTION 


CONSUMPTION 


FIG.  19.— (Finch  and  Baker.) 

to  get  enough  to  eat  the  Europeans  must  thoroughly  till  their 
land.  While  the  wheat  farmers  on  the  cheap  lands  of  Kansas, 
Argentina,  or  the  Red  River  Valley  of  the  North  are  by  their 
hasty  but  inexpensive  methods  *  getting  less  than  twelve  or 
fifteen  bushels  per  acre,  from  land  worth  from  $10  to  $40  per 

•Persons  comparing  the  agriculture  of  the  frontier  with. that  of  Eu- 
rope often  use  the  words  "  careless "  and  "  careful."  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  they  are  equally  careful.  The  methods  of  England  would  bring  loss 
in  Saskatchewan  or  North  Dakota.  In  these  wide  lands,  the  man  rushes 
his  tools  over  a  large  area,  and  by  his  un-thorough  methods  he  actually 
gets  the  greatest  yield  per  man,  a  greater  yield  per  man  than  does  the 
European  with  his  more  laborious  methods  and  his  larger  yield  per  acre. 

40 


LABOR  OR  LAND 


41 


acre,  the  careful  English  farmer,  with  a  systematic  crop  rota- 
tion, is  averaging  thirty  or  even  more  per  acre  on  land  worth 
$200  per  acre.  The  English  tenant  farmer  does  not  make  pro- 
portionately large  profits,  because  he  has  to  pay  high  rent,  and 


EUROPE 
WHEAT 
KWOUCTION 
UCH  DOT  MMUICNTI  MMM 


Fio.  20. — The  extent  of  Europe's  wheat  zone  is  one  of  the  measures  of 
her  excellence  as  a  continent  for  man.     (Finch  and  Baker.) 

because  his  higher  yield  requires  expense  for  labor  and  fertilizer 
that  are  not  profitable  on  the  frontier. 


EUROPEAN  WHEAT  GROWING 

The  hills  and  the  rain  of  northern  and  western  England,  Scot- 
land, and  Wales,  and  the  rains  of  Ireland,  cause  wheat  growing 
to  be  of  small  importance  in  those  parts  of  the  United  Kingdom. 
The  rain  that  makes  Ireland  so  emerald  green  is  too  much  for 
wheat. 

Eastern  and  southern  England,  protected  by  hills  and  distance 
from  the  rain-bearing  westerly  winds,  are  the  chief  British  wheat 
districts.  The  rainfall  is  from  twenty  to  twenty-five  inches  per 
year.  With  their  suitable  climate,  level  plains,  and  fertile  soil 
these  districts  are  about  equal  in  output  to  any  corresponding 


42      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 


WHEAT  TRADE  AND  PRODUCTION 
IMPORTING  COUNTRIES 


Crop 

3   Yr.  Aver. 

Yield 

1911 

1912 

1913 

Crop  i 

Import  ' 

Yield  - 

1911 

1912 

1913 

15.7 
4.5 
315.1 
149.4 
192.4 
25.6 
5.5 
3.7 
66.3 

6.7 

15.3 
3.6 
336.2 
160.2 
165.7 
26.5 
5.6 
3.2 
59.2 

5.4 

15 
4.5 
321.6 
171.1 
214.4 
27. 
4.8 
3.5 
58.4 

6.8 

15.3 
4.2 
324.3 
160.2 
190.8 
26.3 
5.3 
3.4 
61.3 

6.3 

74.5 
7.5 
54.7 
90.6 
58.6 
3. 
77.7 
20. 
221.3 

39. 
35.8 
20.3 
33.1 
16.2 
21.5 
37.3 
13.7 
32.2 

27.7 
13.5 

"39.4 
44.7 
19.8 
30.6 
16.4 
20.9 
38.8 
13.7 
34. 

19.5 

38.6 
26.9 
21. 
33.6 
14.1 
21.8 
39.2 

30. 
16. 

19.9 
35.1 
18.1 
21.9 
34.1 

34.6 
20. 

Denmark    
France            

Germany            

Italv 

Netherlands  

Switzerland  
United  Kingdom  

Average  of  Countries. 
New  York   

Million  bushels.    x  Bushels  per  acre. 

WHEAT  TRADE  AND  PRODUCTION 
EXPORTING  COUNTRIES 


Crop 

3    Yr.  Aver. 

,,.  ,  ,             Bu. 
Yield      \  „ 
(  Per  acre 

1911 

1912 

1913 

Crop 

Export 

Yield  ' 

1911 

1912 

1913 

Argentina  

146. 

166.2 

198.4 

170.2 

100.9 

10.5 

10.3 

9.7 

11.6 

Australia   

98.1 

74. 

95. 

89. 

52.3 

12 

13.3 

9.9 

129 

British  India  

375.6 

370.5 

358.4 

368.1 

59.5 

13 

123 

14  6 

12  1 

Bulgaria    

48.3 

45. 

45. 

46.1 

12.5 

17.6 

17.5 

17.8 

Canada  

230.9 

2242 

231.7 

2289 

1108 

20  7 

20  0 

20  4 

21 

Roumania    

93.7 

88.9 

83.2 

88.6 

53.9 

19.3 

19.7 

17.4 

20.8 

Russia    

447. 

6238 

9626 

677  8 

127  3 

10 

7 

10  3 

TOO 

United  States  

621.3 

730.2 

763.4 

704.9 

115.8 

14.7 

12.5 

15.9 

15.2 

Average  of  Countries 

14.7 

Kansas   

51.03 

92.3 

86.98 

76.77 

13. 

10.7 

15.5 

12.9 

1  Bushels  per  acre. 

area  of  the  United  States.  England  (50,000  sq.  mi.),  with  fifty- 
three  million  bushels  in  1913,  exceeded  as  a  wheat  grower  any 
state  east  of  the  Mississippi  River,  and  had  a  wheat  area  one- 
third  larger  than  that  of  Missouri  (68,000  sq.  mi.).  The 
superiority  of  England  to  Missouri  as  a  wheat  region  is  shown 
by  the  regularity  of  the  yields  in  England  and  the  lesser  regu- 


EUROPEAN  WHEAT  GROWING         43 

larity,  due  to  climatic  causes,  in  Missouri.  Thus,  for  three 
years,  1911  to  1913,  England  grew  sixty,  fifty-four,  and  fifty- 
three  million  bushels — 14  per  cent,  variation.  For  the  same  years 
Missouri  made  thirty-six,  twenty-three,  and  thirty-nine  million 
bushels — 69  per  cent,  variation.*  France,  with  only  one-sixth 
as  much  tillable  land  as  the  United  States,  had,  before  the  war,  a 
wheat  crop  double  that  of  Germany  and  half  that  of  the  United 
States.  French  farms  average  about  twenty  acres  each  and 
those  of  the  United  States  average  one  hundred  and  thirty- 
eight.  Stimulated  by  a  high  tariff,  the  French  farmers  made 
their  country  more  nearly  independent  in  wheat  than  any  other 
country  of  western  Europe.  The  French  wheat  crop  during  the 
Great  War  well  shows  the  influence  of  the  struggle  on  European 
agriculture:  1914,  260  million  bushels;  1915,  205  million  bushels; 
1916,  197  million  bushels;  1917,  150  million  bushels. 

There  has  been  great  increase  in  the  wheat  yields  of  Europe 
since  1840.  Belgium,  with  great  manufactures  and  the  densest 
population  in  Europe,  had  in  1914  an  accompanying  agriculture 
so  productive  that  her  wheat  crop  of  thirteen  million  bushels 
was  greater  in  proportion  to  her  area  than  that  of  any  of  the 
leading  American  wheat  states  of  Kansas,  Minnesota,  and  North 
Dakota.  Holland  and  western  and  southern  Germany  are  also 
important  wheat-growing  regions  in  proportion  to  their  area, 
and  the  crop  is  carefully  tilled;  yet  the  great  manufacturing 
population  of  these  northwestern  countries  of  Europe  consumes 
much  more  wheat  than  the  fertile  and  well-tilled  fields  produce. 

The  European  wheat  grower,  who  gets  twice  the  American 
yield  on  his  high-priced  home  lands  with  their  high  rental, 
usually  changes  his  methods  if  he  migrates  to  the  plains  of  the 
United  States,  Canada,  or  Argentina  where  land  is  cheap,  and 
grows  wheat  there  in  the  cheap  way  of  the  industrial  frontier. 
The  same  process  is  repeated  within  the  United  States.  Old 
states  like  Maine  (with  an  average  yield  of  23.5  bushels  for  1912 
and  25.3  bushels  for  1913)  have,  through  good  care  and  small 
acreage,  a  higher  wheat  yield  than  the  rich  plains  states  where 
North  Dakota,  a  leading  state,  had  a  yield  of  8  bushels  per 
acre  in  1911,  18  bushels  in  1912,  and  10.5  bushels  in  1913. 

*  Before  the  war  the  United  Kingdom  imported  more  than  two-thirds 
of  her  breadstuff's,  but  owing  to  the  fear  of  submarine  starvation  ahe 
expected  to  raise  five-sixths  of  the  1918  requirements. 


44,      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

In  the  Mediterranean  countries  of  Spain,  Portugal,  Italy,  and 
Greece,  where  the  climate  is  so  good  for  wheat,  it  is  the  chief 
grain.  But  the  percentage  of  tillable  land  is  small  owing  to  the 
rough  nature  of  the  country,  the  yield  is  lower  than  in  northern 
Europe,  largely  because  of  the  inferior  methods  of  less  intelli- 
gent and  less  thrifty  people,  and  the  amount  produced  is  not 
sufficient  for  the  very  dense  population.  Yet  Italy,  with  150 
million  bushels  of  wheat  per  year  on  110,000  square  miles  of 
area,  produces  fifty  per  cent,  more  wheat  per  1,000  square  miles 
than  any  American  state,  and  had  thirty-eight  per  cent,  of  her 
crop  land  in  wheat  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war.  In  Algeria  this 
figure  rose  to  forty-four  per  cent.,  and  increased  because  of 
war  demand. 

EUROPEAN  WHEAT  EXPORTERS 

Southeastern  Europe  is  the  only  part  of  that  continent  having 
a  normal  wheat  surplus  for  export.  The  grain-growing  plains  in 
Hungary  and  Rumania  (Danube  Valley)  and  the  Black  Sea 
Basin  of  Russia  and  Rumania,  are  given  over  to  the  growing  of 
wheat  as  the  chief  money  crop.  During  the  four  years,  1910-13, 
European  Russia  averaged  683  millions  of  bushels  of  wheat, 
while  the  United  States  had  687,  but  the  Russian  export  averaged 
153  million  bushels,  while  that  of  the  United  States  was  only  109 
million  bushels.  During  that  period  Rumania  exported  more 
than  one-half  as  much  (57.8  million  bushels)  as  the  whole  United 
States.  Steamers  by  the  hundred  have  for  years  loaded  at  the 
ports  of  Galatz,  Braila,  and  Sulina  on  the  lower  Danube  and  at 
Odessa  on  the  Black  Sea  and  discharged  their  wheat  cargoes  at 
Piraeus,  Palermo,  and  Naples;  at  Genoa  for  the  people  of 
northern  Italy  and  Switzerland,  at  Marseilles  for  the  people  of 
France  (in  years  of  short  crop  in  that  country),  at  Barcelona 
for  the  Spaniards,  or  at  Rotterdam  or  Hamburg  for  the  factory 
workers  of  the  lower  Rhine  Valley  and  Berlin.  Britain  also 
normally  imports  much  wheat  from  Russia.  To  cut  off  the 
eastern  European  trade  was  one  of  the  great  blows  Germany 
dealt  the  Allies,  and  to  win  it  for  herself  by  the  collapse  of 
Russia  was  one  of  her  great  hopes. 


ASIA,  A  LAND  OF  PROMISE  45 

ASIATIC   WHEAT  GROWING 

While  wheat  is  grown  from  Smyrna  at  the  west  of  Asia  to 
Vladivostok  at  the  east,  only  the  plains  of  central  Siberia  and 
northwestern  India  are  a  factor  in  the  export  wheat  supply. 
Large  quantities  are,  however,  grown  for  home  use.  The  small 
populations  clustered  thickly  upon  the  oases  of  Arabia,  Persia, 
Turkestan,  and  other  arid  interior  localities  grow  only  limited 
quantities  for  their  own  use.  In  the  north  of  China,  also,  great 
quantities  are  grown  and  consumed  by  the  natives,  but  there  are 
no  crop  statistics.  An  American  consul  reports  (United  States 
Consul  Reports,  February  23,  1911),  as  the  result  of  observations 
during  a  journey  through  central  and  western  China  in  1910, 
that  wheat  is  extensively  grown  there.  He  saw  fine  wheat  fields 
in  the  Hoangho  Basin  that  would  yield  over  forty  bushels  to  the 
acre.  He  thinks  the  region  north  of  the  Yangtse  Kiang  and 
west  of  the  rice-growing  plains  near  the  coast,  contains  more 
wheat  eaters  than  the  United  States.  He  estimated  the  crop  of 
the  two  provinces  of  Shansi  and  Shensi  at  fifty  million  bushels.* 
New  modern  flour  mills  (owned  by  Chinese)  are  rapidly  making 
Shanghai  so  great  a  center  of  exportation  of  flour  to  the  Chinese 
coasts  that  the  importation  of  American  flour  fell  off  heavily 
from  1907  to  1910.  This  change  has  gone  steadily  forward, 
aided  by  the  war,  until  by  1917  American  exports  to  Hong 
Kong,  long  an  American  flour  user,  had  entirely  stopped  be- 
cause of  the  new  supply  of  Japanese  flour  made  of  wheat  from 
the  plain  of  Manchuria,  where  for  the  first  time  in  centuries 
Japan  had  given  the  order  and  security  that  must  precede 
prosperity  and  export. 

India  in  bad  years  eats  her  crop  and  in  good  years  has  an 
export  which  equaled  twenty  per  cent,  of  that  of  the  United 
States  during  the  years  1911-13.  Indian  wheat  is  chiefly  grown 
in  the  dry  Indus  Valley  and  on  the  plateau  near  Bombay.  Prac- 
tically none  is  grown  in  the  Ganges  Delta  or  on  the  coasts  of  the 
Peninsula,  which  are  low  and  moist. 

There  is  little  doubt  that  the  great  Siberian  plain  reaching 

*  P.  H.  King,  in  his  very  interesting  book  Farmers  of  Forty  Centuries, 
p.  264,  tells  of  seeing  wheat  in  Shantung  Province  that  yielded  ninety-five 
bushels  of  wheat  per  acre  under  the  extremely  laborious  care  of  the 
Chinese  small  farmer. 


46      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

nearly  all  the  way  from  Lake  Baikal  to  the  Urals,  and  closely 
resembling  in  its  black  flatness  much  of  the  Canadian  wheat 
country,  is  the  most  promising  future  wheat  exporter  of  the  Old 
World.  The  Siberian  crop  goes  out  only  through  Russia,  but 
there  is  good  prospect  of  new  routes  by  way  of  river  steamers 
and  the  Arctic  Ocean. 

The  Japanese  wheat  crop  is  equal  to  about  one-tenth  of  her 
rice  crop  or  to  the  wheat  crop  of  Ohio.  There  is  much  interest 
over  the  discovery  that  there  is  room  for  the  extension  of  wheat 
growing  in  the  sparsely  peopled  north  end  of  the  Japanese 
Empire.  Sakhalien,  for  example,  long  considered  hopeless,  is 
now  thought  to  have  winter  wheat  possibilities. 

Manchuria  is  the  only  place  in  Asia  outside  of  Siberia  having 
large  unused  possibilities.  An  American  agricultural  expert  in 
the  employ  of  the  Chinese  Government  estimates  that  the  utiliza- 
tion of  the  now  relatively  empty  wheat  lands  of  Manchuria  and 
eastern  Mongolia  should  produce  by  native  methods  alone  300  or 
400  million  bushels  a  year.  American  flour  disappeared  from 
the  Mukden  market  soon  after  the  Japanese  got  possession,  but 
there  is  no  reason  for  Europe  to  expect  to  consume  much  or  any 
of  the  prospective  Manchurian  wheat.  The  large  and  increas- 
ing population  of  eastern  Asia,  now  importing  some  wheat,  will 
probably  take  it  all. 

WHEAT-IMPORTING    COUNTRIES 

An  examination  of  the  table  on  wheat  trade  and  production 
(see  p.  42)  will  show  that  the  chief  wheat  importers  are  the 
manufacturing  peoples  of  west  Europe,  and  that  their  chief 
supplies  come  from  southeast  Europe,  central  North  America, 
Argentina,  Australia,  and  India.  International  statistics  do  not 
reveal,  what  is  likewise  true,  that  the  entire  region  east  of  the 
Appalachian  Mountains  in  the  United  States,  like  the  manufac- 
turing countries  on  the  other  side  of  the  Atlantic,  draws  large 
supplies  of  wheat  from  the  agricultural  hinterland.  It  hap- 
pens that  a  shipload  of  wheat  from  Duluth  to  Buffalo  is  domestic 
(uncounted  in  official  statistics)  trade,  and  a  shipload  from  the 
Danube  to  Amsterdam  or  to  Barcelona  is  foreign  trade.  Eu- 
rope and  the  United  States  are  much  alike  in  area  and  kinds 


ACCESS  TO  MARKETS  47 

of  production,  but  differences  in  statistical  records  tend  to  hide 
the  similarity. 


SITUATION  OF  WHEAT-EXPORTING  REGIONS   COMPARED 

The  wheat  exporters  of  southern  Europe,  on  the  Black  Sea, 
share  with  the  exporters  of  Argentina  the  advantage  of  cheap 
ocean  transportation  when  the  sea  is  free  and  the  Bosphorus 
bottle  neck  is  open.  The  wheat  exporters  of  the  United  States 
and  Canada  grow  their  surplus  for  export  in  the  heart  of  a  con- 
tinent a  thousand  miles  or  more  from  seaports.  That  this  region 
nevertheless  takes  its  place  among  export  sources  is  due  solely  to 
the  excellence  of  the  transportation  facilities  for  bringing  wheat 
to  ocean  harbors  whence  it  can  be  exported.  In  1825  the  Erie 
Canal  connected  the  Hudson  River  with  the  Great  Lakes  and 
made  possible  boat  transportation  from  the  shores  of  the  Great 
Lakes  to  New  York  at  a  fraction  of  the  previous  cost.  This  new 
route  made  possible  the  profitable  export  of  wheat  from  western 
New  York,  northern  Ohio,  Michigan,  and  other  lake-shore  dis- 
tricts. Ohio  ranked  first  among  the  wheat-growing  states  in 
1839.  Twenty-five  years  after  the  canal  opened  the  lake  shores 
to  the  world  market,  railroads  began  to  reach  from  these  inland 
seas  out  across  the  plains  and  from  that  time  to  this  wheat  has 
gone  eastward  to  the  sea  by  millions  of  bushels,  being  gathered 
together  in  the  great  markets,  first  at  Chicago,  and  then  at  Mil- 
waukee, St.  Louis,  Kansas  City,  Duluth,  Port  Arthur,  and 
"Winnipeg.  But  for  the  war  a  railroad  already  partly  built 
would  doubtless  have  been  completed  from  the  Canadian  wheat 
country  to  Hudson  Bay,  where  for  a  short  time  after  wheat 
harvest  steamers  can  get  out  with  the  Canadian  wheat  crop  be- 
fore the  ice  closes  this  great  and  at  present  unused  arm  of  the 
sea.*  Now,  however,  the  whole  movement  of  wheat  east  of  the 
Rocky  Mountains  is  to  the  Atlantic  ports.  Most  of  it  passes  over 
the  Great  Lakes,  whence,  as  a  result  of  railroad  agreements  of 
many  years'  standing,  it  is  scattered  to  all  ports  between  Mon- 
treal and  Norfolk.  Unification  of  railroad  management  should 
stop  the  scattering,  so  that  all  the  wheat  could  be  sent  by  the 
easiest  routes. 

*Thia  plan  ia  a  duplicate  of  the  Siberia-Arctic  ocean  plan. 


48      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

This  wide  scattering  of  the  grain  carriage  is  due  to  railway 
rate  wars  and  agreements  rather  than  to  natural  advantage.  The 
waterway  of  the  Erie  Canal,  cheaper  than  any  railroad,  in  a 
more  rational  future  should  carry  a  greater  proportion  of  the 
total  supply  than  it  has  carried  in  the  past. 

From  Kansas  southward,  the  Gulf  is  nearer  than  the  Atlantic, 
and  much  wheat  reaches  the  ocean  steamer  at  New  Orleans  and 
Galveston.  The  wheat  of  the  Columbia  Eiver  Basin  and  some 
from  western  Montana  is  exported  from  Portland  and  the  Puget 
Sound  ports;  and  when  the  Great  Valley  of  California  had  a 
wheat  export,  it  went  from  San  Francisco  Bay.  Some  of  our 
Pacific  Coast  export  long  went  to  the  Orient,  but  most  of  it  went 
and  still  goes  to  Europe  by  cheap  water  transportation,  which 
has  always  been  less  expensive  than  an  overland  journey  to  an 
eastern  port,  as  was  proved  by  the  costly  attempt  once  made  by 
the  Southern  Pacific  Railroad  to  carry  wheat  to  Galveston  for 
export  in  competition  with  the  sailing  vessels  that  went  "round 
the  Horn."  The  Panama  Canal,  of  course,  gives  a  final  advan- 
tage to  the  water  route,  save  for  the  ship  famine  period  of  the 
Great  War. 

The  Siberian  wheat  plains,  drained  to  the  frozen  Arctic  and 
shut  off  by  high  mountains  and  foreign  lands  from  the  southern 
sea,  are  in  the  worst  situation  of  all  wheat  exporters.  The 
Siberian  crop  must  yet  take  the  long  rail  journey  to  the  Baltic  or 
Black  Sea  unaided  by  any  such  gift  of  nature  as  the  American 
Great  Lakes  or  the  Danube  River.  For  this  reason  the  Siberian 
plain  has  been  the  last  of  the  world's  great  plains  to  be  settled 
by  the  commercial  agriculturist,  although  we  know  that  it  has 
for  many  centuries  been  the  home  of  wandering  tribesmen,  since 
it  was  this  great  expanse  that  furnished  the  men  who  broke  up 
the  Roman  Empire.  Recent  railroads  have  enabled  Siberia  to 
become  a  wheat  exporter ;  but  its  crop,  combined  with  that  of  the 
adjacent  provinces  of  central  Asia,  amounted  to  only  sixty-two 
million  bushels  in  1911  and  ninety-six  in  1912,  while  in  the  same 
years  that  of  Minnesota  amounted  to  forty-three  and  sixty-seven 
million;  Kansas,  fifty-one  and  ninety-two  million;  and  North 
Dakota,  seventy-three  and  one  hundred  and  forty-three  million. 
But  Siberia  has  great  area,  fertile  soil,  and  the  fecund  popula- 
tion of  Russia  from  which  to  draw  plenty  of  immigrants. 


BY-PRODUCTS  49 

MANUFACTURE  OF  WHEAT  PRODUCTS 

The  manufacture  of  wheat  products  has  followed  the  line  of 
wheat  shipment.  The  waterfalls  at  Rochester  and  Niagara  Falls, 
close  to  the  Erie  Canal,  led  to  the  early  development  of  milling 
on  a  large  scale;  but  the  mills  in  these  centers  have  long  since 
been  eclipsed  by  the  great  flour  mills  of  Minneapolis,  the  great- 
est flour-exporting  city  in  the  world.  Here  the  falls  of  St. 
Anthony  on  the  Mississippi  River  give  power  for  driving  the 
machinery  in  a  location  very  convenient  for  the  assembling  of 
the  wheat  from  the  northwestern  fields  of  the  United  States  and 
Canada.  From  these  Minneapolis  mills  flour  is  sent  to  the  cities 
of  the  northern  and  eastern  United  States  and  western  Europe. 

In  various  towns  along  the  route  of  wheat  shipment  from  the 
Missouri  and  upper  Mississippi  Valley  to  the  sea  have  sprung 
up  manufactures  of  prepared  breakfast  foods,  an  increasing 
form  of  cereal  consumption.  These,  however,  generally  contain 
oats,  barley,  and  corn,  alone,  or  in  combination  with  wheat. 

The  chief  by-product  of  the  American  flour  mills,  bran,  the 
outer  covering  of  wheat,  is  used  as  stock  food,  especially  for 
dairy  cattle,  in  the  same  populous  regions  where  the  flour  is 
bought.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that  China  has  so  few  domestic 
animals  that  the  flour  mills  of  Shanghai  are  handicapped  in  the 
disposition  of  their  by-products. 

The  bran  trade  was  greatly  reduced  during  the  period  of 
the  Great  War  because  so  much  bran  has  been  eaten  by  men. 
Ordinarily  in  the  making  of  the  much  prized  very  white  wheat 
flour  we  kept  about  sixty-one  per  cent,  of  the  grain  for  ourselves 
and  sent  thirty-nine  per  cent,  off  to  the  cattle  in  the  form  of  hull 
and  germ,  called  respectively  bran  and  middlings.  The  food 
directors  of  various  countries,  however,  have  pushed  this  flour 
percentage  up  to  seventy,  and  eighty,  and  even  ninety  per  cent., 
thereby  for  the  time  being  increasing  our  flour  supply  and  re- 
ducing our  bran  supply. 

WHEAT  IN  AMERICA  AND  FOREIGN  TRADE 

Wheat  has  been  important  in  the  foreign  trade  of  the  United 
States  for  two  and  a  half  centuries,  although  we  imported  some 


50      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

in  1837-38.  As  early  as  .1656  the  traders  of  New  York  re- 
joiced over  their  shipments  of  flour  and  bread  to  the  West 
Indies,  where  wheat  could  not  be  grown.  A  century  ago, 
during  the  Napoleonic  wars,  American  wheat  helped  to  feed 
the  European  armies,  and  wheat  export  was  a  most  important 
part  of  our  foreign  trade.  Land  values  of  American  farms  and 
the  location  of  population  depended  partially  upon  the  ability 
to  get  wheat  to  the  sea  by  wagon  or  flat  boat.*  This  cir- 
cumstance gave  great  relative  importance  to  such  lands  as  the 
valleys  of  the  Mohawk,  Susquehanna,  Delaware,  and  Potomac 
rivers,  and  even  such  branch  streams  as  the  Shenandoah  (of  the 
Potomac)  and  the  Schuylkill  (of  the  Delaware).  The  ideas  of 
navigation  in  those  days  were  little  short  of  heroic.  Farmers 
brought  their  wheat  in  flat  boats  down  through  rocks  and  rapids 
on  streams  which  we  now  think  of  as  being  fit  only  for  the  black 
bass  and  the  small  rowboat  of  the  fisherman.  Thus  the  farmers 
on  the  headwaters  of  the  Susquehanna  in  New  York  State 
brought  their  grain  down  to  the  schooners  on  Chesapeake  Bay 
and  the  farmers  of  the  Mohawk  alternately  boated  their  grain 
and  hauled  it  around  rapids  and  falls  as  did  their  brethren 
throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  wheat  region  of  the 
Atlantic  States. 

Throughout  the  whole  of  the  nineteenth  century,  save  in  a 
few  bad  years,  wheat  was  the  leading  agricultural  export  of  the 
Northern  States.  There  is  today,  in  addition  to  the  heavy  trade 
with  Europe,  a  widely  scattered  trade  in  flour  with  the  West 
Indies  and  other  tropical  countries,  where  some  flour  is  used 
and  little  or  no  wheat  is  grown. 

The  future,  however,  probably  promises  to  see  the  export  of 
wheat  from  the  United  States  decline  in  importance  and  in  quan- 
tity. Exports  of  wheat  declined  first  in  favor  of  flour  exports. 
But  there  is  now  in  progress  a  conspicuous  decline  in  the  export 
of  both  wheat  and  flour,  because  increasing  population  leaves  a 
smaller  and  smaller  surplus  for  other  lands.  California  fur- 
nishes an  interesting  example  of  this  change.  That  state,  once 
a  great  wheat  exporter,  reached  her  maximum  wheat  acreage  in 
1893.  Since  that  time  barley  and  alfalfa  fields  and  fruit 
orchards  have  diminished  the  wheat  area,  until  it  is  only  one- 

*  See  population  map  of  1800  and  1810,  United  States  statistical  atlas. 


WHEAT  IN  THE  WAR  51 

fourth  as  great  as  it  was  a  generation  ago.     Thus  it  follows  the 
example  of  New  York  and  Illinois. 


THE  RECENT   WHEAT   SUPPLY 

As  the  export  of  wheat  from  the  United  States  declines,  we  are 
likely  to  see,  during  the  first  third  of  the  twentieth  century,  the 
exports  from  Canada  and  Argentina  increase,  because  of  the 
large  area  of  level  plains  in  these  countries,  new  to  the  plow,  fer- 
tile, and  sparsely  populated — just  the  kind  of  place  for  wheat 
growing  by  the  one-crop  method,  which  produces  large  yields  for 
a  short  time.  Before  the  war  the  Argentine  wheat  exports  of 
about  one  hundred  million  bushels  a  year  nearly  equaled  the 
combined  wheat  and  flour  exports  of  the  United  States.  In  1911 
Argentina  exports  exceeded  those  of  the  United  States.  The  pro- 
portion of  the  crop  exported  is  significant.  In  1881-90  the 
United  States  exported  27  per  cent,  of  the  crop ;  1891-1900,  32 
per  cent. ;  1901  to  1910,  18  per  cent.  In  the  year  1910  export 
had  dropped  to  10.9  per  cent.,  while  that  of  Argentina  was  52 
per  cent.  During  the  years  1911-13,  the  United  States  exported 
on  the  average  123  million  bushels  per  year,  or  17.2  per  cent, 
of  its  crop,  and  Argentina  101  million  bushels,  or  59.4  per  cent, 
of  its  crop.  In  1910,  when  the  United  States  exported  10.9  per 
cent,  of  the  crop  and  Argentina  exported  52  per  cent.,  Canada 
sent  out  28  per  cent.  Canada's  rise  is  indicated  by  the  yield  of 
Saskatchewan — four  million  bushels  in  1900,  thirty-four  million 
in  1908,  121  million  in  1913,  and  147  million  bushels  in  1916. 

During  the  first  two  years  of  the  war  the  United  States  acci- 
dentally and  perhaps  unfortunately  was  an  important  contribu- 
tor to  the  world's  wheat  supply,  but  the  next  two  years  were 
different.  In  1914  this  country,  having  had  wheat  crops  averaging 
705,000,000  bushels  in  the  three  previous  years,  had  the  good 
luck  to  have  a  record  crop — 891,017,000  bushels.  That  crop  fur- 
nished a  surplus  for  Europe  that  season.  Europe  also  had  a  fair 
crop.  Then,  by  the  same  luck  which  enables  a  gambler  occa- 
sionally to  throw  two  double  sixes  in  succession,  the  crop  of  1915 
again  broke  the  record — 1,011,505,000  bushels — and  shipments 
to  the  Allies  totaled  243,000,000.  The  1916  harvest  dropped 
back  to  rather  below  normal— 640,000,000  bushels;  1917  brought 


52      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

660,000,000  bushels— and  the  1918  high  price  of  wheat  was  the 
natural  result  in  a  war-torn  world. 


FUTURE  WHEAT  SUPPLY  OF  THE  WORLD 

After  all,  the  crop  of  one  country  is  not  so  important  as  the 
total  supply,  because  if  there  is  wheat  on  the  surface  of  the 
earth  it  can  go  to  any  hungry  country  that  has  the  price  and 
access  to  the  world  market.  What  of  the  world  supply? 

In  1898  Sir  William  Crookes,  a  distinguished  British  chemist, 
wrote  an  alarmist  paper  prophesying  an  early  world  shortage  of 
wheat.  He  was  mistaken.*  There  is  no  shortage  of  wheat  ahead 
of  a  peaceful  world,  certainly  for  the  next  fifty  years.  After 
that  it  depends  entirely  upon  the  rate  of  increase  in  population, 
for  plainly  if  population  increases  in  geometrical  ratio  there 
must  come  a  time  when  any  kind  of  food  supply  is  manifestly 
impossible ;  but  population  does  not  so  increase  over  large  areas 
for  long  periods  of  time.  Our  present  shortage  is  due  to  mili- 
tary, not  to  economic,  causes.  Wheat  is  piled  up  now  in  Aus- 
tralia and  Argentina  waiting  to  get  to  market. 

Because  of  the  uncertainty  of  future  demand,  i.e.,  the  pros- 
pect of  abundance  soon  after  peace  comes,  the  United  States 
Government  felt  it  necessary  to  promise  to  pay  $2.00  for  wheat 
of  the  1918  crop,  even  if  the  world  price  is  below  that  figure, 
and  $2.26  for  the  1919  crop.  This  minimum  guarantee  is  a 
sign  of  possible  plenty  rather  than  famine.  Great  future  re- 
sources are  yet  unused.  There  are  three  ways  by  which  we  may 
get  more  wheat: 

1.  Discovery  of  new  wheat  areas. 

2.  Enlargement  of  existing  areas  through  the  planting  of  hardier 
varieties. 

*  Lord  Rhondda,  busy  for  two  years  rationing  England,  pinched  by 
submarines,  brought  out  a  new  edition  of  Crookes'  book  (1917)  with  this 
frightened  statement: 

"  England  and  all  civilized  nations  stand  in  deadly  peril  of  not  having 
enough  to  eat.  As  mouths  multiply,  food  resources  decline. 

"  The  wheat-eating  world  is  growing  in  population,  while  the  wheat- 
producing  acres  are  about  all  in  use.  What  is  needed  is  a  thirty  bushel 
to  the  acre  crop  in  place  of  a  thirteen  bushel  crop.  Fertilizer,  not  more 
acres,  is  the  hope." 

Insular  thought !    He  was  thinking  of  the  world  in  terms  of  England. 


EXTENSION  OF  WHEAT  LANDS  53 

3.    Increase  of  the  yield  through  the  use  of  more  productive  varieties, 
new  methods,  and  more  thorough  culture,  fuller  utilization  of  land. 

1.  NEW  AREAS.  In  a  sense  one  may  say  that  there  are  no 
new  wheat  areas  to  be  discovered,  for  we  have  made  a  begin- 
ning on  all  of  the  wheat-growing  regions;  but  there  are  three 
regions  of  such  great  possibility  of  increase  that  they  may  almost 
be  called  new  wheat  regions.  These  are  central  North  Amer- 
ica, Argentina,  and  the  region  that  we  have  long  called  the 
Russian  Empire — Russia  and  Siberia. 

a.  The  plains  of  western  Canada,  over  which  the  wheat  dis- 
tricts are  steadily  spreading,  are  a  region  of  great  but  as  yet 
undetermined  possibilities.  We  do  not  know  the  wheat  bounda- 
ries. Only  years  of  trial  and  scientific  experiment  can  establish 
the  limits.  But  there  seems  to  be  little  cause  to  modify  Dr. 
Saunders's  reasonable  prophecy  of  1904 — that  wheat  grown  on 
one-fourth  of  the  land  suitable  to  it  in  the  Canadian  Northwest, 
with  the  acre  yield  of  Manitoba  for  the  previous  decade,  would 
bring  a  crop  of  more  than  800  million  bushels,  which,  as  he 
shows,  would  feed  30,000,000  people  in  Canada  and  three  times 
supply  the  import  need  of  Great  Britain.  The  remaining  three- 
fourths  of  the  land  would  provide  room  for  a  vast  animal  indus- 
try with  soil-enriching  crop  rotations. 

It  is  quite  possible  that  these  figures  are  too  small,  for  the 
boundaries  of  this  region  show  interesting  chances  of  enlarge- 
ment. The  northern  boundary  is  set  by  cold  and  frost,  the 
southwestern  by  increasing  aridity,  due  to  low  rainfall  and  in- 
creasing evaporation  with  the  greater  heat  of  lower  latitudes. 
Experiments  in  wheat  culture,  however,  are  steadily  going  on 
along  the  indefinite  western  boundary  from  northern  Texas 
through  western  Kansas,  Nebraska,  the  Dakotas,  and  western 
Manitoba,  Saskatchewan,  and  Alberta;  in  fact,  along  the  whole 
western  edge  of  the  winter  wheat  and  spring  wheat-belts  of  the 
United  States  and  Canada — a  full  1,800  miles.  Perhaps  in 
future  decades  we  may  find  that  the  most  of  this  region  of  the 
Great  Plains  down  to,  or  even  beyond,  the  Arkansas  River  may 
be  counted  on  to  yield  wheat.  The  chances  arc  in  favor  of  the 
supposition.  Suppose  a  gain  of  but  one  hundred  miles  for 
the  wheat-belt — 1,800  miles  long.  A  yield  of  twelve  bushels  to 
the  acre  on  nine-tenths  of  this  every  fourth  year  gives  420 


54      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

million  bushels,  more  than  enough  to  feed  the  United  Kingdom, 
and  most  of  the  land  still  left  for  other  crops. 

Most  of  the  known  wheat  country  of  Canada  is  still  uncropped. 
The  Canadian  wheat  crop  of  1916  covered  less  than  23,000  square 
miles,  or  just  one-tenth  the  area  of  Manitoba.  With  present 
knowledge  it  is  certain  that  the  now  recognized  wheat-belt  of 
central  United  States  and  western  Canada  is  good  for  an  in- 
crease of  several  hundred  million  bushels  of  wheat  per  year,  per- 
haps a  billion,  possibly  even  more.  It  depends  chiefly  on  the 
price. 

b.  The  Siberian  wheat  region  is  the  geographic   double  of 
North  America,  a  long  belt  stretching  in  Canadian  latitudes  be- 
tween a  northern  forest  zone  as  in  Canada,  where  the  limit  is 
cold,  and  a  southern  arid  zone  where  the  limit  is  drought,  begin- 
ning north  of  the  Caspian  Sea  and  reaching  to  the  mountains 
of  Mongolia.     The  Siberian  belt  is  even  longer  than  the  Cana- 
dian, and  may  possibly  produce  more  wheat.     At  the  present 
time  there  are  not  in  all  Siberia  more  than  5,000,000  white  peo- 
ple.   The  region  has,  beyond  any  reasonable  doubt,  possibilities 
of  an  increase  of  hundreds  of  millions  of  bushels  of  wheat. 

c.  Argentina  has  not  room  for  such  a  large  increase,  although 
it,  too,  promises  to  be  a  region  of  major  importance.*     It  also 
has  a  long  western  drought  boundary,  and  it  is  handicapped 
by  hot  winds  and  sometimes  by  late  frosts.    There  is  a  consid- 
erable area  of  good  wheat  land  east  of  the  territory  now  grow- 
ing wheat,  but  it  is  held  in  the  large  estates  so  common  in 
Spanish  lands,  and  the  owners  prefer  the  easier  task  of  raising 
cattle  and  sheep. 

As  an  evidence  of  possibilities,  Uruguay,  long  a  wheat  im- 
porter, had  an  export  surplus  in  1918  due  to  war  prices. 

The  exceedingly  fertile  lava  soils  of  the  Columbia  Basin, 
"Washington,  Oregon,  and  Idaho,  because  of  the  limited  area, 
rank  in  the  second  class  of  wheat  regions  of  possible  expansion. 
Manchuria  is  also  in  this  class. 

*A  geographer  thus  describes  the  best  section  of  Argentina:  "Two  hun- 
dred thousand  square  miles  of  fertile  delta  plain,  one  hundred  to  two 
hundred  feet  in  elevation,  with  no  streams  in  a  day's  journey.  There  are 
many  little  undulations  with  temporary  lakelets  in  the  hollows.  Per- 
manent water  is  sixty  to  seventy  feet  down,  with  tanks  and  windmills 
everywhere.  Cattle  have  been  paying  seven  per  cent.,  wheat  growing  tew 
per  cent.,  with  shallow  plowing  and  poor  seed." 


BREAD  AND  CONSTRUCTIVE  BOTANY 


55 


Fio.  21. — An    experiment    in    plant    breeding,    cross-bred    wheat    showing 
great  variation  in  offspring  of  hybrids. 

AB=parents  same  variety  as  ab 
but  crossed  the  other  way. 

A'A"A'"  —  hybrid  offspring  of 
AB-cross. 

C.C, 

D,D2 


ab,  =  parents. 

a'a"a'"  =  offspring  of  ab-Cross. 

c.c,     } 

d,d,    >•  etc.  =  offspring  of  a'a'V". 


E,E, 


etc.  =  offspring  of  hybrids 
A'A"A'". 


The  hybrid  offspring  show  every  possible  combination  of  the  visible 
qualities  of  the  parent  stocks.  By  this  means  new  varieties  of  great  value 
in  Washington  and  Minnesota  have  been  produced.  This  method  is  ap- 
plicable to  thousands  of  species  of  plants,  one  of  man's  greatest  tools. 


2.  ENLARGEMENT  OP  WHEAT  AREAS  THROUGH  NEW  VARIETIES 
OF  SEED.  There  is  every  reason  to  expect  increase  in  the  yield 
on  old  areas  through  the  raising  of  better  varieties  of  wheat.  We 
are  just  learning  to  apply  Mendel's  Law,  the  usable  work- 


56      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

ing  law  of  heredity.*  By  its  use  plant  varieties  are  almost  like 
clay  in  the  hand  of  the  potter.  We  may  expect  to  make  over 
most  of  the  crops  grown  by  man,  and  even  change  so  old  a 
staple  as  wheat.  This  is  not  mere  speculation.  We  have 
already  begun,  and  progress  in  plant  breeding  should  be  very 
rapid  from  now  on  if  science  can  turn  its  energies  from  de- 
struction to  construction.  Eecent  work  in  the  Northwest  shows 
how  this  new-found  ability  is  destined  to  enrich  every  land 
in  the  world  and  to  increase  the  amount  of  bread  for  all  man- 
kind. On  the  lava  plains  of  eastern  Washington  the  prac- 
tically rainless  summer  permits  the  farmers  to  let  the  wheat 
stand  for  a  month  after  it  is  ripe.  It  gets  so  dry  that  it  can 
be  gathered  by  the  most  wonderful  of  all  harvesting  machinery, 
the  combined  harvester  and  thrasher,  which,  drawn  by  twenty 
or  thirty  horses  or  a  big  engine,  swings  around  the  broad  acres 
and  at  intervals  sets  down  a  wagon  load  of  sacked  grain, 
absolutely  ready  for  the  miller.  The  harvesting  can  accord- 
ingly be  extended  over  a  period  of  several  weeks,  and  a  few 
hands  can  thus  take  care  of  vast  farms.  It  so  happened, 
however,  that  the  best  yielding  variety  permitted  many  of  the 
grains  to  scatter  out  of  each  head  and  fall  to  the  ground  before 
it  was  cut.  The  rival  variety  that  held  its  grain  tightly  was 
so  tender  as  to  be  injured  one  year  in  three  by  the  frosts,  which 
follow  periods  of  warmth  and  growth  in  this  land  of  open  winter, 
where  wheat  is  usually  sown  in  the  fall.  An  experimenter  at 
the  agricultural  experiment  station  in  the  State  of  Washington 
crossed  these  two  varieties,  and  produced  a  third  variety  which 
has  the  frost-resisting  qualities  of  one  parent  and  the  grain- 
holding  qualities  of  the  other,  thus  permitting  a  large  extension 
of  wheat  growing  on  the  wide,  fertile  lava  plain  of  the  Columbia 
Basin,  where  this  splendid  soil  averages  50  per  cent,  more  wheat 
per  acre  than  the  rest  of  the  United  States.  Thus  a  new  wheat 
land  was  made  out  of  scanty  pasture. 

The  introduction  of  foreign  varieties  has  already  been  very 
effective  in  increasing  the  American  harvest.  The  large  pro- 
duction in  the  spring  wheat-belt  of  the  United  States  and  Canada 
did  not  take  place  until  after  the  introduction  of  the  Red  Fyfe, 

*  See  Punnet,  R.  C. :  Mendeliam.  New  York  (Wilshire  Book  Company), 
1909.  Also  much  current  literature. 


EXTENDING  THE  LIMITS 


57 


*V      /  ' 

v     >r        \jtf  r 


58      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

a  variety  well  suited  to  that  climate.  The  recent  introduction 
to  the  United  States  and  Canada  of  a  drought-resisting  and 
rust-resisting  variety  of  wheat  known  as  Durum,  from  the  arid 
lands  of  eastern  Europe,  has  caused  the  farther  extension  of 
the  spring  wheat  area  into  the  drier  lands.  This  variety  of 
wheat  contains  much  gluten  and  is  thus  very  valuable  for  the 


FIG.  23. — The  location  of  the  Canadian  wheat  area  shows  what  a  small 
proportion  of  that  great  country  has  yet  been  utilized. 

4 

manufacture  of  macaroni.  More  than  fifty  million  bushels  per 
year  have  been  grown  in  the  United  States,  and  the  acreage  is 
increasing  rapidly  in  the  more  arid  sections  of  the  spring-wheat 
belt. 

Wheats  of  arid  lands  are  of  more  value  to  man  because  of 
the  higher  content  of  nitrogen  and  protein,  and  the  consequent 
greater  value  of  the  bread  as  a  meat  substitute. 

The  introduction  of  new  varieties  gives  new  materials  for  the 
plant  breeders  to  use.  Plant  explorers  are  now  scouring  the 
corners  of  the  world  in  search  of  plants  particularly  adapted  to 
particular  purposes  and  environments.  These  plants,  special- 
ized in  one  quality  to  the  point  of  genius,  can  be  used  as  parent 
plants  by  the  plant  breeders.  Before  long  we  may  expect 
from  this  source  other  new  varieties  that  will  still  further 
invade  that  ever  shrinking  enemy  empire,  "the  Great  American 
Desert." 

3.  INCREASE  OP  THE  YIELD  THROUGH  THE  USE  OF  MORE  PRO- 
DUCTIVE VARIETIES,  NEW  METHODS,  AND  MORE  THOROUGH  CUL- 
TURE. The  wheat  grower  can  obtain  more  grain  from  a  given 
piece  of  ground  by  better  cultivation  and  fertilizing.  If  wheat 
should  become  relatively  scarce,  that  is  to  say,  stay  at  a  price 
corresponding  to  the  United  States  Government  price  of  the 


PRICE  INCREASES  PRODUCT  59 

present  time,  $2.26  a  bushel  to  the  farmer,  it  would  pay  the 
farmer  to  put  on  more  work  and  more  fertilizer  than  it  would 
pay  him  to  use  if  the  price  were  to  be  only  $1.00,  as  it  was 
before  the  war.  It  might  pay  him  to  make  a  yield  of  twenty 
or  twenty-five  bushels,  where  before  it  had  not  been  profitable 
to  make  more  than  twelve  or  fifteen.  There  are  enormous  possi- 
bilities of  increased  wheat  production  if  wheat  should  become 
relatively  higher  in  price.  If  we  now  turned  some  money  that 
goes  for  automobiles,  phonographs,  high-heeled  shoes,  and  other 
luxuries  toward  flour  it  is  difficult  to  predict  the  amount  of 
wheat  that  might  result.  There  are  also  very  large  possibilities 
of  increase  in  yield  at  a  very  slight  increase  over  pre-war  prices, 
merely  by  the  use  of  more  intelligence  and  by  the  enactment  of 
necessary  legislation  to  promote  rather  than  to  interfere  with 
largo  scale  scientific  use  of  the  land.  Thus  the  increasing  price 
of  meat  products,  which,  for  a  time  before  the  war,  rose  more 
rapidly  than  the  price  of  wheat,  made  it  desirable  to  keep  more 
cattle ;  and  it  is  true  the  world  around  that  where  farmers  keep 
more  cattle  their  farms  tend  to  increase  in  fertility,  and  the 
grain  crops  to  increase  in  yield. 

Russia,  with  its  low  yield  of  ten  bushels  per  acre,  might  easily 
average  fifteen  or  eighteen  bushels,  with  a  slight  increase  of  ani- 
mal industry  and  a  system  of  land  ownership  that  would  place 
a  premium  on  good  farming  rather  than  on  bad  farming.  The 
democracy  in  the  life  of  the  Russian  village  or  mir,  while  it 
produced  absolute  equality  of  men  with  regard  to  the  owner- 
ship of  the  land  on  which  they  lived,  has  also  produced  very 
poor  crops,  because  no  man  owned  a  field.  He  owned  a  share 
in  the  village  holdings.  The  shares  were  from  year  to  year 
redistributed,  so  that  there  was  no  reason  why  a  peasant  should 
enrich  his  patch  and  hand  the  results  of  his  labor  over  to  his 
neighbor  the  next  year.  To  make  matters  worse,  in  the  attempt 
to  get  equality  of  land,  each  of  the  four  or  five  types  of  soil 
that  the  village  happened  to  own  would  be  divided  into  as  many 
pieces  as  there  were  farmers  in  the  village,  so  that  a  farmer 
might  have  a  field  only  eight  feet  wide  with  a  dead  furrow  and 
no  grain  at  the  edge  where  it  joined  his  neighbor's  tract,  which 
might  also  be  but  five  or  ten  feet  wide.  If  out  of  their  revolu- 


60      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

tions  the  Russians  establish  order  and  individual  land  owner- 
ship, their  yield  of  wheat  will  probably  increase — if  demand 
exists. 

There  are  few  countries  indeed  where  social  and  legal  im- 
provement may  not  make  substantial  increase  in  food  produc- 
tion including  wheat. 

The  most  important  single  element  to  increase  the  fertility 
of  the  soil  and  stimulate  the  growth  of  wheat  is  nitrogen,  used 
by  the  plant  in  the  form  of  nitrates  of  which  we  have  in  recent 
decades  begun  to  import  hundreds  of  thousands  of  tons  from 
the  natural  beds  of  Chilean  nitrate  (nitrate  of  soda).  Much 
more  significant,  however,  is  the  manufacture  of  nitrates  directly 
from  the  air,  with  the  assistance  of  limestone  and  heat  derived 
cither  from  the  electric  arc  or  from  coal.  This  product,  com- 
monly called  cyanamide  (containing  nitrate  of  lime)  is  now 
being  manufactured  by  the  thousands  of  tons  at  Niagara  Falls, 
and  in  Norway,  Sweden,  and  many  places  on  the  continent  of 
Europe.  Germany  even  boasted  that  she  was  free  from  any  need 
of  the  Chilean  nitrate  from  which  the  British  blockades  had 
barred  her.  The  late  Lord  Rhondda,  British  food  administra- 
tor, said  in  1917,  ''England  and  the  United  States  are  laggards 
in  the  fixation  of  atmospheric  nitrogen.  .  .  .  The  German 
farmer  now  produces  much  more  food  per  acre  than  the  British, 
though  he  has  a  poorer  soil  and  climate." 

Ammonia  is  also  obtained  from  sulphate  of  ammonia  made 
in  the  by-product  coke  oven,  which  distils  many  pounds  of  pre- 
cious plant  food  for  every  ton  of  coke  that  passes  though  it. 
People  in  the  United  States  are  today  mining  and  wasting  by 
burning  with  their  coal  enough  ammonia  to  fertilize  far  more 
wheat  than  they  eat. 

We  must,  however,  be  careful  not  to  capitalize  all  these  new 
substances  too  highly.  Many  writers  point  to  England's  thirty 
bushels  of  wheat  per  acre,  as  compared  with  America's  fifteen 
bushels  and  Russia's  ten,  and  say  that  the  difference  is  all  due 
to  the  slipshod  work  of  the  farmer.  This  is  not  true.  England 
has  one  of  the  most  dependable  climates  in  the  world.  The 
great  wheat  regions  of  the  United  States  and  of  Russia  and  of 
Argentina  are  subject  to  freaks  of  climate  that  cannot  be  over- 
come by  the  keeping  of  cattle  or  by  the  use  of  nitrate  of  soda, 


THE  MARGINAL  LANDS 


61 


or  sulphate  of  ammonia,  or  nitrates  from  the  electric  furnace, 
or  new  varieties  from  the  desert's  edge  or  the  sub-arctic  regions. 
Without  water  the  grass  of  the  field  withereth,  and  wheat  is 
grass.  The  figures  previously  mentioned  (p.  28)  show  that  the 


FIG.  24. — Cultivating  beans  with  traction  engine,  Sutler  Basin,  Cali- 
fornia. Scenes  of  tractor  plowing  and  harrowing  are  very  common.  If 
it  develops  perfection  in  cultivation  also,  the  limits  of  its  usefulness  will 
be  enormously  widened.  (Courtesy  Country  Gentleman.) 


experimental  fields  at  Cheyenne  yielded  under  similar  culture 
in  consecutive  years  nine  bushels,  seven  bushels,  and  thirty- 
seven  bushels  respectively,  because  of  a  difference  of  three  inches 
of  rain  (369  tons  per  acre)  in  the  growing  season.  England 
with  her  system  and  her  climate  can  maintain  an  average  of 
thirty  bushels  per  acre  (her  extremes  have  been  38.75  in  1863 
and  15.5  in  1879),  but  there  is  no  reason  to  expect  a  thirty- 


62      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

bushel  average  in  a  developed  Dakota,  or  a  developed  Canada, 
or  a  developed  Siberia.  Nature  shuffles  her  cards  roughly  in 
these  regions.  There  will  be  fine  crops  and  there  will  be  fail- 
ures that  are  beyond  the  power  of  man  to  remedy,  so  that 


\/ 


Yield,  In  bushels,  per  acre. 
Rainfall,  in  inches.  May  and  June. 


Fio.  25 — Relation  between  rainfall  and  wheat  yield  in  South  Dakota 
They  do  not  always  agree  because  of  the  heat  factor.  (T.  A.  Blair, 
Monthly  Weather  Review.)  See  Fig.  8. 

seventeen  to  twenty-two-bushel  averages  are  perhaps  our  high- 
est reasonable  hope. 

There  has,  however,  come  on  the  scene  a  new  factor,  whose 
possible  power  to  make  wheat  is  almost  as  little  foreseen  today 
as  was  the  influence  of  the  locomotive  in  1840.  It  is  the  farm 
tractor,  a  machine  still  in  rapid  process  of  technical  develop- 
ment. We  have  made  great  strides  in  the  cheap  production  of 
wheat  by  getting  tools  that  depend  on  the  muscle  of  our  strong 
beasts  rather  than  on  the  muscle  of  our  weak  selves.  The  iron 
horse,  hitched  to  the  wagon  and  the  boat,  has  made  a  new  world. 
The  iron  horse  (tractor)  hitched  to  the  plow  is  going  to  work  an- 
other transformation,  particularly  in  the  world  of  wheat.  It  has 


THE  TRACTOR  63 

just  begun.  The  wheat  crop  of  the  world  is  today  dependent, 
with  a  few  exceptions,  upon  the  muscle  of  beasts.  The  Italians 
are  even  still  cutting  much  wheat  by  hand  on  their  terraces  and 
little  odd-shaped  patches  on  their  steep  and  rocky  mountain 
slopes.  But  most  of  the  land  for  the  world's  crops  is  plowed 
by  the  horse,  the  mule,  the  ox,  and  the  Indian  buffalo,  which  also 
draw  the  seeding  drill  and  the  reaper.  There  are  enough  camels 
helping  to  make  the  list  picturesque.  At  the  most,  these  farm 
animals  may  be  needed  for  only  six  or  eight  weeks  of  work  in 
producing  the  grain  crop ;  but  they  must  eat  for  twelve  months. 
If  there  is  a  crop  failure  every  third  year  they  must  eat  for 
eighteen  months  in  order  to  make  two  crops;  and  if  there  is  a 
failure  every  other  year,  they  must  eat  twenty-four  months  in 
order  to  make  two  crops.*  Despite  their  months  of  necessary 
loafing  they  get  tired  when  they  work,  and  must  rest.  They 
get  hot,  they  get  sick,  they  go  lame.  The  farm  tractor  does  not 
get  tired,  it  does  not  eat  when  it  is  not  working.  It  can  go  night 
and  day,  and  in  the  rush  season  a  man  who  has  had  a  long 
period  of  rest  can  work  fifteen  or  sixteen  hours  a  day  for  many 
days,  and  then  some  one  else  can  take  his  tractor  and,  with  our 
present  knowledge  of  lighting,  keep  it  going  throughout  the 
night.  One  man,  instead  of  driving  three  or  four  or  even  ten 
horses,  turns  on  the  power  of  twenty,  or  forty,  or  sixty  horses 
that  may  work  twenty-four  hours  a  day.  The  acreage  of  level 
plain  that  a  family  can  plant  with  this  new  help  may  be  several 
times  as  large  as  that  within  the  reach  of  man  aided  merely 
by  beasts.  It  is  already  claimed  that  in  level  portions  of  Dakota 
a  man,  with  the  help  of  his  wife  and  one  child,  can  plant  120 
acres. 

After  purchasing  their  tractors,  9  of  the  14  Kittson  County  farmers 
stated  they  farmed  an  average  of  183  acres  more  per  farm  with  the 

* "  Our  records  show  that  the  use  of  the  tractor  has  increased  the 
amount  of  land  handled  per  person.  Records  from  149  farms  in  Min- 
nesota show  that  44  of  these  farms  increased  their  farm  area  on  an 
average  105  acres  and  at  the  same  time  farmed  this  increased  amount 
with  two  horses  h-ss.  Records  from  a  322-acre  farm  using  4-hottom 
plows  show  that  before  the  tractor  was  used  nine  horses  were  kept  and 
afterwards  eight.  Records  from  very  large  farms  of  1,074  acres  show  the 
use  of  21  horses  before  a  tractor  was  used  and  12  afterwards." — Extract 
from  letter  from  L.  B.  Bassett,  Assistant  Professor  of  Farm  Manage- 
ment, University  of  Minnesota,  February  26,  1919. 

To  a  considerable  extent  horse  food  may  also  be  man  food. 


64      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

same  amount  of  help.  This  made  an  average  increase  of  67  acres  per 
man.  Since  small  grain  is  the  principal  source  of  income  in  this  county, 
this  could  more  easily  be  done  than  in  regions  where  corn  is  an  impor- 
tant crop.  Nearly  all  of  the  co-operators  said  they  were  able  to  save  in 
hired  help. — University  of  Minnesota,  Agricultural  Extension  Div. 
Special  Bulletin  No.  31,  page  5. 


FIG.  26. — Distribution  of  labor  on  a  Dakota  grain  farm.  One  of  the 
great  needs  of  the  farms  growing  small  grains  only  is  something  to 
equalize  the  work.  The  importance  of  winter  dairying  is  made  evident  by 
this  chart,  as  is  also  the  advantage  of  the  tractor.  (U-  S.  Dept.  Agr., 
Year  Book,  1911.) 

This  enlarged  acreage  means  reduction  in  the  cost  of  wheat 
growing.  It  means  that  wheat,  since  it  can  be  produced  more 
cheaply,  can  be  grown  in  lands  that  we  before  thought  worthless 
because  of  the  uncertainties  of  rainfall.  Take  again  the  case  of 
Cheyenne,  which  in  three  seasons  produced  respectively  9.3,  7.8, 
and  37.6  bushels.  The  average  was  18.2.  Four  of  the  low  crops 
and  one  of  the  high  would  still  average  14.3,  a  figure  that  looks 


THE  PER  CAPITA  YIELD  65 

well  among  national  averages,  made  possible  by  one  good  season 
in  five.  Such  farming  would  scarcely  be  profitable  with  the  aid 
of  beasts,  but  it  is  easily  practicable  with  the  aid  of  the  tractor. 

In  lands  of  low  rainfall  it  has  been  well  proved  that  the  wheat 
yield  can  be  increased  in  quantity  and  certainty  by  the  practice 
of  summer  fallowing,  which  means  plowing  the  land  one  year 
and  raising  the  crop  the  next.  By  this  means  no  plant  is  allowed 
to  grow  during  the  fallow  season  and  much  of  the  water  that 
would  otherwise  evaporate  through  the  growing  plants  (a  sur- 
prising amount)  remains  in  the  subsoil,  where  it  welcomes  the 
next  year's  rainfall  and  combines  with  it  to  water  one  good  crop 
out  of  the  two  years'  supply.  The  trouble  with  this  system  in 
the  work-beast  era  is  that  it  requires  much  cultivation.  It  is 
easy  to  see  how  the  tractor  helps  at  summer  fallowing  and  so  will 
push  the  wheat  fields  out  into  the  lands  of  little  rain  and  of  frost. 
The  tractor  will  enable  wheat  growing  to  become  a  dependable 
business  in  climates  where  frost  or  drought  may  almost  spoil  two 
crops  out  of  three,  if  one  bumper  crop  gets  to  the  thrashing 
machine ;  farms,  towns,  and  food  supply  may  then  be  found  in 
places  where  now  the  farmer  gives  up  in  despair. 

There  is  no  way  as  yet  to  reduce  to  figures  what  the  tractor 
may  do  for  us,  but  it  probably  will  enable  seven  great  wheat- 
belts  running  through  five  continents  to  be  widened  out — toward 
the  region  of  drought  and  frost  through  central  Asia  and  cen- 
tral North  America,  and  toward  the  region  of  drought  through 
Argentina,  Australia,  and  South  Africa. 

WHEAT  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES,  1839-1909  1 
Year 

1839 

1849 

1859 

1869 

1879 

1889 

1899 

1909 

1  Census  statistics  not  available  for  years  prior  to  1839.* 
*  From  Geography  of  the  World's  Agriculture,  p.  14. 


PRODUCTION 

Total 

Per  cent  of 

Per  capita 

(bushels) 

all  cereals 

(bushels) 

84,823,272 

13.7 

5.0 

100,486,944 

11.5 

4.3 

173,104,924 

13.9 

5.5 

287,745,626 

20.7 

7.5 

459,483,137 

17.0 

9.2 

468,373,968 

13.3 

7.4 

658,543,252 

14.9 

8.7 

683,379,259 

15.1 

7.4 

66      WHEAT:  TRADE,  COMPARISONS  AND  PROSPECTS 

This  possibility  of  development  means  that  we  are  in  the 
beginning  of  another  century  of  spring  wheat  which  has  in 
the  last  sixty  years  made  wheat  more  abundant  in  the  com- 
mercial world. 

Taken  altogether,  the  undeveloped  lands  of  the  present  wheat 
regions,  the  possible  regions  of  the  new  wheat  growing,  the  new 
varieties,  the  new  fertilizers,  the  new  knowledge,  and  the  farm 
tractor,  seem  to  promise  that  a  wheat  supply  is  within  our  reach 
for  many,  many  decades  if  we  can  but  devote  our  powers  to  the 
conquest  of  nature  rather  than  to  the  destruction  of  man. 


CHAPTER  III 
MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

ORTHODOXY  IN  DIET  AND  THE  BREAD  SUPPLY 

BREAD  is  the  staff  of  life,  but  must  it  be  of  wheat?  There  are 
many  other  grains,  but  amazing  is  the  orthodoxy  of  diet. 

"I'd  ruther  eat  what  I'd  ruther,"  said  the  slum  woman. 
Thus  she  ended  the  efforts  of  the  intelligent  friend  who  was 
trying  to  improve  the  condition  of  a  family  suffering  from  mal- 
nutrition. Here  is  one  of  the  great,  perhaps  the  greatest,  of 
limiting  factors  in  the  world's  food  supply — i.e.,  unreasoning 
preference,  a  senseless  conservatism  that,  having  heard  the  teach- 
ings of  science,  will  not  try  or  even  stop  to  consider  new  foods 
which  involve  the  changing  of  dietary  habits.  Because  some 
common  foods  do  not  agree  with  some  persons,  it  was  long  ago 
said  that  "One  man's  meat  is  another  man's  poison,"  and  it 
may  equally  be  said  that  "One  nation's  food  is  another  nation's 
amazement."  It  is  hard  for  the  Virginian,  eating  good  corn 
pone,  to  understand  why  nations  refuse  to  eat  a  cereal  pro- 
duced by  the  thousands  of  millions  of  bushels,  a  staple  food 
for  hundreds  of  millions  of  people — a  staple  food  for  thousands 
of  years.  Yet  even  the  hungry  Belgians  at  times  refused  it, 
and  English  and  Irish  people  short  of  food  would  eat  anything 
else  before  they  would  touch  it,  simply  because  they  had  grown 
up  with  the  notion  that  corn  is  hog  and  chicken  food. 

Emerson's  correspondence  with  Carlyle  on  the  use  of  corn 
meal  shows  how  hard  it  is  to  introduce  new  foods. 

Style,  that  habit  of  doing  what  others  do,  particularly  what 
those  whom  we  consider  superior,  do,  is  one  of  the  strong  forces 
that  helps  to  limit  man's  food  supply  in  certain  directions, 
though  sometimes  it  makes  him  enlarge  his  food  supply  by  eating 
the  most  surprising  things. 

How  did  seaweeds  and  candied  grasshoppers  come  into  use  in  Japan, 
and  fried  rhinoceros  hide  in  Africa,  and  powdered  deer  horns  in  China, 

67 


and  pickled  pigs'  feet  in  Germany,  and  mouldy  cheese  with  skippers 
in  it  in  England,  and  snails  and  frogs'  legs  in  France,  and  grasshop- 
pers, fried  and  reduced  to  a  meal,  in  Arabia,  and  snakes  and  lizards 
among  the  North  American  Indians,  and  octopus  among  the  Neapoli- 
tans, and  wood-grubs  among  the  New  Zealand  Maoris,  and  larks' 
tongues  and  eels  fed  on  the  flesh  of  slaves  in  Rome,  and  caviar,  the  eggs 
of  the  Volga  sturgeon,  among  the  Russians,  and  rats  and  mice  and  dogs 
and  cats  among  the  Chinese,  and  human  flesh  among  the  Fiji  Island- 
ers? Is  it  reasonable  to  suppose  that  these  customs  were  acquired  in 
some  mysterious  evolutionary  way?  Is  it  not  highly  probable  that 
these  foods  came  into  vogue  just  as  we  know  coffee  and  tea  and  the 
potato  and  tobacco  and  chocolate  have  come  to  be  fashionable  today  in 
European  and  American  countries,  through  the  encouragement  given 
by  those  who  set  the  fashions  of  the  day  ?  * 

The  vogue  of  the  potato  is  an  example  of  the  successful  intro- 
duction and  rapid  spread  of  a  new  food  no  better  than  many 
others,  but  having  the  great  help  of  proper  patronage. 

Sir  Walter  Raleigh  is  given  credit  for  its  introduction  into  Ireland. 
The  friars  of  Spain  took.it  to  Italy.  There  are  records  of  the  governor 
of  Mons  having  received  it  from  the  papal  legate  of  Belgium.  When 
we  remember  the  rank  of  Raleigh  and  the  standing  of  the  Catholic 
Church,  it  is  easy  to  understand  how  potato  eating  became  fashionable 
in  Ireland — came  to  be  the  great  food  crop  of  that  island.  It  was,  in 
my  opinion,  the  fashion  for  it  which  started  its  cultivation.! 

When  we  think  of  the  almost  indefinite  variety  of  plants  that 
are  already  eaten  by  man  somewhere,  and  the  yet  greater  vari- 
ety that  certainly  contain  elements  of  nutrition,  it  is  an  astound- 
ing pity  that  man  should  be  so  bound  by  unreason  that  he  act- 
ually displays  less  sense  than  a  cat. 

There  are  conclusive  proofs,  for  example,  that  cats  and  rabbits  wan- 
dering through  our  gardens  taste  of  the  new  plants  which  are  put 
there.  The  cats  of  Boston  learned  in  less  than  two  years  from  the  time 
of  its  introduction  into  America  that  a  wild  vine  from  central  China 
was  good  to  eat,  and  ate  it  to  the  ground.  The  wild  rabbits  of  western 
Canada  singled  out,  nibbled,  and  killed  a  new  species  of  ash  from 
Turkestan  the  first  year  it  was  grown  in  a  nursery  on  the  prairie4 

*  Fairchild,  David :  "  The  Palate  of  Civilized  Man  and  Its  Influence  on 
Agriculture,"  Journal  of  Franklin  Institute,  March,  1918,  p.  311. 

Fairchild,  David:   Op.  cit. 
t  Fairchild,  David:  Op.  cit. 


CULTIVATION  OF  TASTE  69 

Now  that  we  have  begun  to  study  the  sciences  of  nutrition 
and  of  economic  botany,  and  have  made  a  feeble  beginning  at 
the  teaching  of  nutrition  and  cookery  in  the  schools,  we  may 
hope  for  better  progress  toward  the  time  when  man  looks  at 
his  food  supply  as  a  scientific  question.  When  he  does,  the  world 
will  be  twice  as  big  as  it  is  now,  as  a  home  for  man,  for  it  will 
have  twice  its  present  food  possibilities. 

Our  American  children  of  the  next  generation  should  be  more 
untrammeled  than  we  have  been  in  their  diet,  and  able  at  any  time  to 
shift  from  one  food  product  to  another  as  the  price  or  shortage  dictates. 
They  should  have  a  mobility  of  action  which  will  enable  them  to  go 
anywhere  and  eat  anything  fit  to  eat,  and  test  out  and  eliminate  or 
keep,  as  the  case  may  be,  any  new  foods  which  the  investigations 
and  experiments  of  plant  introduction  and  plant  breeding  and  the 
growing  genius  of  food  chemistry  will  surely  bring  into  existence.  .  .  . 

We  have  a  curious  spectacle  in  our  common  schools — thousands  of 
little  children  poring  over  books  on  the  volcanoes  of  the  world  which 
they  will  never  see,  the  North  Pole,  which  they  can  never  expect  to 
visit,  and,  when  the  noon  hour  comes,  satisfying  their  hunger  from 
their  dinner  pails  with  no  word  from  the  teacher  regarding  perhaps  the 
most  acute  sense  they  have — the  sense  of  taste. 

Taste  is  the  avenue  of  our  contact  with  the  world  of  chemical  things. 
It  is,  after  all,  one  of  our  five  senses.  Is  it  not  worthy  of  all  the  study 
which  can  be  given  to  it,  and  should  not  the  education  of  the  human 
palate  become  a  matter  of  great  importance  and  every  effort  be  made  to 
teach  the  value  of  a  wide  liking  for  everything  that  is  good  to 
eat?  Let  us  not  be  misled  by  those  who  scoff  at  the  problem.  Scoffing 
is  a  trait  unworthy  of  intelligent  man.  Think  of  the  conservatories  of 
music  where  the  sense  of  hearing  of  thousands  of  our  youth  is  trained, 
and  the  academies  of  art  where  the  sense  of  sight  is  cultivated,  and 
then  compare  these  with  the  schools  of  Domestic  Economy  and  see 
what  a  gulf  there  is  between  them.  How  far  we  must  yet  go  to  put 
the  cultivation  of  the  American  palate  where  it  really  belongs !  * 

In  that  day  we  will  laugh  at  the  panic  of  Sir  William  Crookes, 
the  English  scientist  of  1898,  for  we  will  have  discovered  that  the 
danger  of  his  threatened  wheat  shortage  is  removed  into  the  in- 
definite future,  because  we  can  make  bread  from  many  other 
things.  These  other  bread  materials  may  be  classified  in  five 
great  groups :  the  minor  cereals  of  the  temperate  zone,  discussed 
in  this  chapter ;  corn ;  rice ;  starchy  roots,  and  nuts  and  acorns — 
discussed  in  the  following  chapters. 

•Fairchild,  David:  Op.  ctf. 


70       MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

RESEMBLANCE  OF  THE  MINOR   CEREALS  TO  WHEAT 

Of  the  minor  cereals,  three,  barley,  rye,  and  oats,  are  grasses 
like  wheat  and  greatly  resemble  it  in  most  of  their  agricultural 
qualities,  as  well  as  in  actual  food  value.  They  differ,  however, 
from  wheat  in  various  minor  ways,  which  give  them  a  different 
place  in  farming  and  a  somewhat  different  distribution  over  the 
earth's  surface. 

1.  RYE.  Botanically,  this  plant  is  so  closely  allied  to  wheat 
that  it  is  often  hard  to  tell  one  plant  from  the  other.  Rye  will 
grow  where  wheat  grows  and  also  in  other  places.  But  the 
grain  is  smaller,  a  little  less  nutritious,  less  highly  esteemed,  and 
hence  less  valuable.  It  rarely  outyields  wheat.  It  is,  therefore, 
almost  entirely  absent  from  all  the  important  wheat  lands  of  the 
world,  and  is  primarily  the  grain  of  poor  lands  and  the  food  of 
poorer  peoples.  The  straw  is  longer  than  wheat  straw ;  because 
of  its  value  as  packing  material  the  rye  grower  is  sometimes  able 
to  sell  it  for  a  good  price,  but  this  advantage  is  relatively  unim- 
portant. That  rye  is  grown,  nevertheless,  is  due  to  the  fact  that 
it  will  grow  in  many  soils  and  climates  where  wheat  will  not 
grow  so  well,  if  at  all.  Compared  with  wheat  it  is  a  kind  of  goat 
in  its  ability  to  live  under  harsh  conditions.  It  is  much  hardier 
and  will  grow  in  colder  and  more  exposed  places.  For  this  reason 
there  is  a  huge  rye-belt  in  south-central  Russia,  occupying  the 
northern  edge  of  the  great  black  soil  belt,  of  which  wheat  holds 
the  southern  part.  It  is  also  the  only  grain  that  can  live  over 
winter  in  parts  of  South  Dakota.  Rye  will  sprout  more  quickly 
than  wheat  and  in  colder  weather.  It  will  sprout  and  grow  at  a 
temperature  of  but  a  few  degrees  above  freezing,  when  wheat  will 
be  practically  at  a  standstill.  This  hardihood  permits  the  farmer 
in  northern  lands  to  plant  it  late  in  the  autumn,  when  it  would 
be  impossible  to  grow  wheat,  and  also  allows  him  to  extend  the 
season  of  work  for  man,  teams,  and  tools.  It  has  great  value 
as  another  crop  and  therefore  really  another  job  for  the  spring 
wheat  farmer.  Late  planting  and  the  ability  to  stand  a  cold 
winter  made  rye  a  more  profitable  grain  than  wheat  during  the 
five-year  period  of  1910-14  in  Minnesota,  North  Dakota,  and 
South  Dakota.  The  amount  grown  is  increasing  in  these  states. 
It  is  also  attacked  by  fewer  insects  and  diseases  than  wheat,  and 


RYE  AND  POOR  LAND  71 

usually  is  ripe  before  rust,  the  great  enemy  of  wheat,  becomes 
severe.  For  these  reasons  rye  was  a  better  crop  than  wheat  in 
1910-14  in  South  Carolina,  Alabama,  and  Texas,  although  the 
amount  grown  in  those  states  was  very  small  indeed. 

Kye  will  also  grow  in  sourer  (more  acid)  soils  than  wheat  can 
endure.  To  grow  wheat  it  would  be  necessary  to  put  on  lime 
to  neutralize  the  acid  and  sweeten  the  soil.  In  the  region  of  north- 
ern Pennsylvania  and  southern  New  York,  where  prevail  the  so- 
called  Volusia  soils,  which  are  naturally  acid,  rye  has  become 
the  leading  winter  grain.  Rye  requires  only  four-fifths  as  much 
nitrogen  as  wheat  per  pound  of  yield  (it  also  has  less  nitro- 
gen in  it)  and  therefore  grows  on  poorer  lands  and  with  less  arti- 
ficial fertilizer  than  must  be  used  for  wheat.  Finally,  on  sandy 
soil  rye  grows  better  than  wheat.  This  explains  a  very  large 
region  of  rye  production  in  Poland  and  eastern  Prussia,  in  ex- 
actly the  same  latitude  as  the  great  wheat  region  of  central  Ger- 
many. Again  in  sandy  Holland  and  Belgium  rye  comes  to  the 
front  as  the  chief  grain,  while  northern  France  with  the  clayey 
soils,  in  which  the  feet  of  so  many  millions  of  soldiers  have 
stuck,  is  a  wheat  country.  Sandy  soil  helps  to  explain  each  of 
the  large  rye  districts  (see  map,  p.  73)  of  western  Michigan, 
Wisconsin,  and  southeastern  Minnesota. 

Rye  has  one  more  agricultural  virtue.  Not  only  will  it  stand 
the  cool  autumn,  the  cold  winter,  the  wet,  the  sandy  and  poor 
soils,  but  it  will  also  grow  in  rough,  ill-prepared  land  in  hilly 
country.  Thus  it  tends  to  become  the  grain  of  mountain  peo- 
ples, and  is  grown  to  some  extent  in  the  hilly  country  of  south- 
central  Pennsylvania  and  western  North  Carolina,  and  on  each 
of  the  three  high  hill  regions  of  the  western  European  mainland: 
namely,  northwestern  Spain,  Brittany,  and  the  plateaus  of  south- 
western France,  where  there  is  a  considerable  area  with  a  sur- 
prisingly cool  climate.  Rye  would  doubtless  be  grown  also  in 
the  non-wheat  growing  parts  of  Britain  but  for  the  British 
prejudice  against  rye  products.  Barley  and  oats  have  the  ground 
instead. 

It  is  not  unnatural  that  rye,  with  these  qualities,  has  long 
been  called  the  grain  of  poverty. 

As  a  breadstuff  it  is  almost  the  peer  of  wheat  in  nutrition, 
except  for  some  shortage  of  protein.  It  does  not,  however, 


72       MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

have  as  much  gluten ;  that  is  to  say,  it  does  not  make  as  spongy 
a  dough  or  as  light  a  bread,  so  that  the  rye  loaf  is  more  solid, 
lacking  the  big  pores  found  in  wheat  bread.  The  bread  is  also 
much  darker  in  color.  For  these  reasons  rye  sells  at  a  lower 
price  than  wheat ;  and,  while  most  of  it  is  used  as  a  breadstuff, 
it  is  primarily  used  by  people  with  a  low  purchasing  power 
and  consequent  low  standard  of  living.  Where  the  land  is  poor 


FIG.  27. — Compare  this  map  with  the  map  of   European   wheat  growing 
(Fig  20)   and  note  slight  difference  in  location.     (Finch  and  Baker.) 

and  weather  cold,  the  people  are  also  usually  poor;  the  cheap 
rye  is  the  breadstuff  of  the  masses.  For  example,  in  central, 
northern,  and  northeastern  Europe  rye  is  the  chief  breadstuff 
of  the  poorer  people,  as  Indian  corn,  the  cheap  grain  of  the 
warm  land,  is  in  parts  of  southern  Europe  and  Mexico.  The  nor- 
mal world  production  of  rye  is  about  half  that  of  wheat,  from 
1,500  to  1,800  million  bushels. 


REGIONS  OP  RYE   PRODUCTION 


Fully  nineteen-twentieths  of  the  world's  rye  is  grown  and 
eaten  in  Europe.    We  are  too  rich  for  it  yet  in  America,  al- 


RYE  REGIONS  79 

though  we  have  increased  its  production  remarkably  (on  a  per- 
centage basis)  during  the  war.  The  crop  of  1917  was  sixty 
million  bushels;  that  of  1913,  forty-one  million;  that  of  1909, 
twenty-nine  million.  The  world's  greatest  rye  production  is  on 
the  low  plain  of  northern  Europe,  reaching  from  the  English 
Channel  through  Holland,  Belgium,  Germany,  Denmark,  and 
Russia  to  the  Ural  Mountains.  The  soil  is  in  many  places  sandy 
and  poor;  and  the  climate  is  cool  or  cold  and  often  damp  and 


UNITED  STATES 

RYE 

ACREAGE 
EACH  DOT  REPRESENTS  1.000  ACRES 


Fio.  28. —  (Finch  and  Baker.) 

Here,  as  in  Norway  and  Sweden,  rye  grows  better  than 
wheat,  and  exceeds  it  in  production.  Although  Russia  is  the 
world's  greatest  wheat  grower,  she  grows  more  rye  than  wheat. 
Her  large  export  of  wheat  is  due  to  the  fact  that  the  people  eat 
the  rye.  Russia  alone  produces  more  than  half  of  the  world's 
rye  crop,  in  normal  times,  and  the  average  yield  is  twelve  bushels 
per  acre,  while  that  of  wheat  is  ten.  Germany  produces  more 
than  a  fourth  of  the  world's  supply,  Austria-Hungary  more  than 
a  tenth,  and  the  United  States,  with  its  thirty  to  forty  million 
bushels,  less  than  a  fiftieth.  Austria-Hungary  grows  four  times 
as  much  rye  as  does  the  United  States ;  Germany  ten  times,  and 
Russia  twenty-five  times  as  much.  In  peace  times  Germany  grew 


74       MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

three  times  as  much  rye  as  wheat.  The  peasants  and  factory 
workers  of  rye-growing  countries  eat  the  most  of  the  rye  in  the 
form  of  black  bread,  which,  after  all,  is  nearly  as  nourishing  as 
wheat  bread.  But  these  people  frequently  substitute  the  superior 
and  more  highly  esteemed  wheat  bread  for  rye  bread  when  they 
become  able  to  buy  wheat. 

Two-thirds  of  the  rye  grown  in  the  United  States  in  normal 
times  is  used  to  feed  farm  animals,  and  part  of  the  remaining 
one-third  is  used  to  make  alcohol.  Rye  bread  is  seldom  used  in 
this  country  except  by  people  who  acquired  the  habit  in  Europe. 
It  is  said  that  the  German  emperor,  William  II,  used  occasionally 


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FIG.  29. — This  allows  why  Russia  and  Germany,  and  to  a  lesser  extent 
Austria-Hungary,  have  long  been  known  as  lands  of  black  rye  bread. 
(Finch  and  Baker.) 

to  trade  the  white  bread  of  the  palace  kitchens  for  the  black 
rye  bread  of  a  peasant  boy. 

As  it  grows  with  little  care  and  on  rough  ground,  rye  was 
relatively  more  important  in  the  earlier  days  in  the  United 
States,  before  the  settlement  of  the  level  West,  than  it  now  is. 
The  census  of  1839  shows  the  per  capita  production  to  be  three 
times  that  of  1909.  Rye  mixed  with  corn  meal  was  an  important 
breadstuff  in  New  England  before  western  New  York  began  to 
ship  wheat  to  the  East.  The  chief  centers  of  production  in  the 
United  States  are  the  Appalachian  region,  from  the  Potomac 
and  the  Ohio  to  Lake  Champlain,  and  the  sandy  districts  be- 
tween Minneapolis  and  Detroit.  As  the  conditions  of  eastern 
Canada  resemble  those  of  the  eastern  United  States,  rye  is 
grown  to  a  similar  extent  there. 

In  Nebraska  the  rye  acreage  has  jumped  from  60,000  in 
1909  to  over  200,000  in  1915,  chiefly  because  part  of  this  .state 
lies  between  the  regions  where  June  is  cool  enough  for  good 
spring  wheat  and  those  where  the  winter  is  suitable  for  good 
winter  wheat.  This  helps  to  explain  the  loss  of  eighty-three 
per  cent,  of  the  winter  wheat  sown  in  that  state  in  1917,  and 
the  rapid  increase  in  the  amount  of  rye,  which  throughout  the 


RYE  REGIONS  75 

world  is  almost  exclusively  sown  in  the  fall  like  winter  wheat. 

In  respect  to  crop  rotations  and  farm  practice,  rye,  oats,  and 
barley  are  similar  to  wheat.  If  the  Anglo-Saxon  world  becomes 
just  a  little  bit  hungry  for  wheat  bread  it  will,  of  course,  discover 
that  the  rye  we  now  feed  to  the  pigs  and  the  cows  is  good 
breadstuff.  Witness  the  American  experience  of  1918: 

"All  bread  used  at  West  Point  Academy  is  composed  of  45 
per  cent,  wheat  flour,  45  per  cent,  rye  flour,  and  10  per  cent, 
white  bolted  corn  flour.  This  bread  is  entirely  satisfactory  and 
many  students  consider  it  superior  to  the  former  product  com- 
posed entirely  of  wheat  flour."  *  If  breadstuffs  become  scarce, 
we  shall  also  find  that  rye  production  can  in  all  probability  be 
greatly  extended,  though  not  so  far  as  wheat,  for  rye  does  not 
have  great  ability  to  withstand  drought.  Its  superior  ability 
to  survive  cold,  however,  may  give  us  on  the  northern  edge  of  the 
world's  spring  wheat-belts  great  spring  rye-belts  through  north- 
western Canada  and  north-central  Siberia.  It  should  be  rioted, 
however,  that  this  possibility  is  not  now  indicated  by  any  exten- 
sive spring  rye  industry,  although  a  little  spring  rye  is  grown 
in  a  number  of  places. 

2.  OATS.  The  Scotch,  probably  because  their  moist  climate 
gives  them  an  oat  country,  have  most  largely  utilized  the  oat 
as  human  food.  Dr.  Johnson's  dictionary  is  said  to  have  defined 
oats  as  "food  for  men  in  Scotland,  horses  in  England,"  to 
which  the  Scotch  replied,  "And  England  is  noted  for  the  excel- 
lence of  her  horses,  Scotland  for  the  excellence  of  her  men." 
The  people  of  other  countries,  since  forming  the  breakfast  food 
habit,  are  learning  to  eat  more  oatmeal.  A  little  oaten  bread 
is  used  in  parts  of  northern  Europe,  but  the  main  use  in  all  coun- 
tries is  for  horse  food.  In  the  United  States  at  the  present  time 
the  consumption  for  human  food  is  about  three  and  one-fourth 
pounds  per  capita,  less  than  one-thirtieth  of  the  crop.  In  parts  of 
Scotland  the  agricultural  laborer  lives  very  largely  on  oat  prod- 
ucts and  milk,  while  the  dairy  cattle  that  produce  the  milk  live 
very  largely  on  oat  straw  and  turnips. 

As  horse  food,  the  crop  seems  to  be  without  peer  in  giving 
spirit  and  energy,  so  that  people  say  of  a  frisky  horse,  "He  is 
feeling  his  oats."  As  human  food,  analysis  shows  that  it  is 

*  Official  Bulletin  of  the  Food  Administration,  February  28,  1918. 


76       MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

very  high  in  protein,  giving  some  basis  for  the  Scotch  faith  in 
it  and  an  explanation  of  its  fitness,  when  taken  in  combination 
with  milk,  to  nourish  the  Scottish  workman. 

The  experience  of  antarctic  explorers  with  oatmeal  compressed 
in  two-pound  cans  shows  it  to  have  wonderful  durability,  and 
points  to  its  excellence  not  only  for  transportation  and  storing, 
but  for  hoarding  against  a  time  of  need. 


FIG.  30. — The  wide  distribution  of  this  important  forage  grain  again 
attests  the  excellence  of  Europe  for  agriculture  when  compared  with  the 
United  States,  which  in  Fig.  31  and  in  all  other  charts  shows  such 
light  production  in  the  western  half  of  the  country.  (Finch  and  Baker.) 


The  soil  requirements  of  the  oat  plant  are  not  unlike  those 
of  wheat,  but  it  can  grow  in  a  greater  variety  of  soils  and  is 
not  so  exactingly  fond  of  limestone  soils.  In  its  climatic  re- 
quirements it  differs  from  wheat  in  being  unable  to  stand  as 
much  drought;  but  it  is  able  to  stand  more  rain,  because  it 
can  fertilize  its  blossoms  in  weather  rainy  enough  to  make  the 
wheat  plant  barren.  The  oat  blossom  and  later  the  oat  grain  hang 
like  fruit,  stem  up,  wrapped  in  a  protecting  envelope,  which 
lets  the  fertilizing  processes  of  the  blossom  go  on  through  rain 
as  they  cannot  in  the  wheat,  which  holds  its  head  erect.  The 


OAT  REGIONS  77 

oat  can  stand  nearly  as  much  heat  as  wheat,  but  being  nearly 
always  spring  sown  it  has  a  later  growing  season  and  requires 
more  rain  than  winter  wheat.  In  regions  having  mild  win- 
ters like  southwestern  France  and  southern  United  States, 
it  is  grown  to  some  extent  as  a  winter  grain,  and  har- 
vested before  wheat,  but  its  growth  in  this  way  is  not  ex- 
tensive. Its  moisture  requirements  bar  it  from  regions  having 
the  Mediterranean  type  of  climate  (Spain,  California,  Aus- 
tralia), with  their  hot,  dry  summers,  but  it  is  grown  in 
California  as  a  hay  crop,  for  which  purpose  it  makes  suffi- 
cient growth  before  the  drought  stops  the  growth  of  the  plant. 
The  fact  that  the  oat  requires  a  shorter  growing  season  than 
wheat  makes  it  a  competitor  of  spring  wheat,  and  enables  it 
to  grow  further  north  than  spring  wheat.  It  thus  becomes  im- 
portant on  the  northern  edge  of  the  wheat-belt  in  Manitoba, 
Saskatchewan,  and  Alberta.  It  grows  almost  up  to  the  Arctic 
Circle  in  Sweden  and  Finland,  and  is  of  great  relative  impor- 
tance in  Denmark,  Germany,  and  Russia,  in  all  of  which  regions 
it  grows  on  the  northern  edge  of  the  wheat-belt.  Its  ability 
to  thrive  on  sand  is  shown  by  its  heavy  growth  on  the  Baltic 
shores  of  Germany  and  Denmark.  Because  of  these  qualities, 
it  is  grown  to  some  extent  in  very  nearly  all  the  important 
northern  wheat  regions  and  also  in  rye  and  northern  barley 
regions.  It  is  of  the  greatest  relative  importance  in  such  cool, 
damp  countries  as  Ireland,  Scotland,  Sweden,  Norway,  Hol- 
land, Belgium,  and  Denmark,  and  is  grown  to  a  great  extent 
also  by  the  people  of  the  central  and  eastern  European  rye- 
belt.  In  Sweden  it  takes  up  thirty-three  per  cent,  of  the  crop 
land,  and  in  England  twenty-four  per  cent.  It  is  also  impor- 
tant in  the  eastern  half  of  Canada,  where  the  climate  is  too 
cold  for  corn.  In  the  colder  northern  parts  of  Korea  and 
Japan,  where  rice  docs  not  thrive  and  wheat  is  not  at  its  best, 
the  farmer  resorts  to  oats  and  barley,  but  feeds  oats  only  to 
cattle. 

GROWN  ON  THE  SAME  FARM  AS  INDIAN  CORN 

Because  oats  may  be  sown  in  the  spring  and  will  stand  the 
hot  summer  if  the  rainfall  is  abundant,  it  is  a  very  important 
grain  in  parts  of  the  corn-belt  of  the  United  States.  In  much  of 


78       MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

this  territory  the  summer  is  not  fully  suited  to  spring-sown 
wheat,  and  the  alternate  freezing  and  thawing  of  the  open  winter 
often  injures  winter  wheat.  Oats,  being  unhurt  by  a  little  frost, 
are  well  adapted  to  these  climatic  and  agricultural  conditions. 
Sown  very  early  in  the  spring  before  it  is  warm  enough  to 
plant  corn,  the  crop  requires  no  attention  until  harvest  time, 
after  the  corn  has  been  planted  and  received  all  the  cultivation 


FIG    31  — (Finch  and  Baker.) 

that  is  considered  necessary.  Then  while  the  corn  is  maturing, 
after  the  hay  harvest  or  possibly  before  it,  the  oats  are  harvested. 
The  oat  crop  is  not  particularly  profitable  of  itself,  but  the 
dovetailing  of  these  crops  makes  the  field  of  oats  as  well  as 
the  field  of  corn  and  the  field  of  hay  a  part  of  the  farm  system, 
in  much  of  the  corn-belt,  and  here  is  grown  the  greater  part  of 
the  United  States  crop,  nearly  a  billion  bushels.  Oats  have  an- 
other value  to  this  corn-belt  farm,  in  that  they  serve  as  the  nurse 
crop  for  the  young  clover  and  timothy,  which  are  the  chief  hay 
crops.  In  sections  where  winter  wheat  is  grown  a  crop  of  oats 
can  be  sown  as  a  catch  crop  in  early  spring  after  a  bad  winter 
has  ruined  the  wheat  crop. 

The  United  States  leads  in  the  production  of  oats.    The  Rus- 
sian crop  is  almost  equal  to  that  of  the  United  States  and  nearly 


OATS  AND  THE  TRACTOR  79 

double  that  of  Germany,  the  third  oat  producer.  The  greater 
intensity  of  European  culture  is  shown  by  average  yields  per 
square  mile  in  1913  of  2,248  bushels  in  Illinois,  3,064  in  Den- 
mark, and  4,216  in  well-tilled  Belgium. 


EFFECT  OF  THE  LIGHT  WEIGHT  ON  EXPORT 

The  oat  grain  has  a  thick,  light,  close-fitting  husk  which  is 
not  removed  by  thrashing.  It  is  left  upon  the  grain  if  used 
for  animals  and  only  removed  by  special  machinery  when  the 
grain  is  prepared  for  human  food.  This  husk  contributes  to 
the  great  variation  in  the  weight  of  oats,  ranging  from  twenty- 
five  to  fifty  pounds  per  bushel,  in  contrast  to  the  small  varia- 
tion commonly  found  in  wheat  and  corn.  The  usual  legal 
weight  of  oats  is  thirty-two  pounds  per  bushel,  corn  fifty-six, 
wheat  sixty.  The  large  bulk  per  unit  of  value  is  one  of  the  rea- 
sons for  the  small  export  from  the  United  States,  which  amounts 
to  less  than  a  twentieth  part  of  the  crop.  Another  and  greater 
reason  for  the  small  export  from  America  is  the  great  impor- 
tance of  oats  in  the  agriculture  of  the  grain-importing  coun- 
tries of  Europe.  Northwestern  Europe  imports  ordinarily  about 
ten  per  cent,  of  its  oat  consumption,  southwestern  Europe  about 
five  per  cent.,  of  which  all  but  one  per  cent,  is  produced  by 
the  regions  commercially  tributary  to  the  Baltic. 

Oatmeal  makes  up  an  important  part  of  the  American  ex- 
port of  oats.  The  centers  of  manufacture  are  a  number  of 
small  towns  in  Iowa  and  other  corn-belt  states,  from  which 
the  familiar  little  pasteboard  boxes  and  the  more  economical 
sacks  and  barrels  go  out  by  millions.  There  is  also  little  doubt 
that  if  we  set  our  minds  to  it  we  can  devise  various  kinds  of 
bread  and  cakes  that  will  permit  men  to  make  a  much  larger 
use  of  oats  as  a  wheat  substitute. 

The  recent  successful  growth  of  experimental  plans  and 
some  fields  of  oats  in  the  Yukon  Valley  of  Alaska  show  that 
this  plant  along  with  rye  and  wheat  can  help  extend  the  grain 
and  bread  lands  northward.  The  farm  tractor  is  just  as  impor- 
tant in  the  cultivation  of  rye,  oats,  and  barley  as  of  wheat.  The 
utilization  of  this  machine  in  extreme  northern  agriculture  is 
of  peculiar  value  because  of  the  ever-lengthening  season  of  idle- 


80       MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

ness  and  non-employment  for  the  work  animal,  as  we  go  north, 
and  the  ever  greater  difficulty  of  getting  food  for  him.  The 
oat  crop  in  this  northern  extension  of  the  grain  district  is  of 
extra  fine  quality,  because,  as  it  is  apparently  native  in  cold, 
moist  lands,  the  northern  crop  is  likely  to  have  a  larger  grain 
and  greater  weight  of  food  per  bushel  than  the  grain  grown 
farther  south. 


FIG.  32. — The    universal    growth    of    oats    in    eastern    Canada    finds    its 
counterpart  only  in  cornless  Europe.     (Finch  and  Baker.) 


3.  BARLEY.  It  is  natural  that  the  writers  of  Scripture,  as 
well  as  the  Latin  writers,  should  have  mentioned  barley 
loaves,  for  barley  is  the  breadstuff  of  the  desert's  edge.  It  is 
also  the  breadstuff  of  tKe~  Arctic  edge — the  hardiest  of  the 
important  cereals.  Having  a  shorter  season  of  growth  than 
rye  or  oats,  it  finishes  quickly  in  a  short  sub-arctic  summer 
or  a  short,  rainy  season  in  lands  of  little  rain.  The  wheat 
limit  in  Russia  is  near  Petrograd,  but  barley  extends  to  the 
Arctic  regions.  Its  green  blades  are  stolen  alike  by  the  sledge- 
drawing  reindeer  and  the  desert-crossing  camel.  The  appear- 
ance of  the  growing  plant  and  of  the  seed  bears  close  resem- 
blance to  wheat.  Under  similar  cultural  conditions  the  yield 
per  acre  is  much  greater  than  that  of  wheat,  with  the  advan- 
tage of  wider  climatic  range.  The  average  yield  in  the  United 
States  (1912-14)  was  26.4  bushels  per  acre,  while  the  yield  of 


HEAVY  BARLEY  YIELD  81 

wheat  was  15.9  bushels,  and  of  corn  26.0  bushels.  Barley  is 
important  in  northern  Norway  and  Sweden,  and  in  the 
adjacent  Lapland,  growing  beneath  the  midnight  sun,  and 
ripening  150  miles  beyond  the  Arctic  Circle.  It  is  regularly 
grown  in  Finland  and  northern  Russia  to  the  shores  of  the 
Arctic  Ocean,  and  its  ability  to  resist  droughts  and  heat 
causes  it  to  be  grown  as  far  south  as  the  Nile  Valley,  Abys- 
sinia, and  the  eastern  point  of  Africa,  near  the  equator.  It 
has  been  the  breadstuff  of  the  nomad  Bedouin  for  unnumbered 
centuries,  and  the  stalwart  and  exceedingly  handsome  appear- 
ance of  this  noble-looking  villain  shows  that  it  is  good  bread- 
stuff, too,  even  though,  with  wheat  at  our  command,  we  refuse  to 
use  it.  Barley  has  less  protein  and  carbohydrates  than  wheat, 
but  more  fats  and  salts. 

Unfortunately  it  lacks  the  gluten  necessary  to  make  soft, 
light  bread.  But  for  this  gluten  shortage  barley  would  doubt- 
less, because  of  its  cheapness,  replace  wheat  as  our  dominant 
breadstuff,  and  with  the  new  knowledge  of  plant  breeding  such 
a  change  may  yet  be  possible.  The  large  yield  of  barley  in 
combination  with  its  ability  to  resist  drought  made  it  the  chief 
grain  food  of  the  ancient  Hebrews,  Greeks,  and  Romans,  who 
had  rather  dense  population  in  lands  with  a  very  dry  summer 
(Mediterranean  climate).  At  the  present  time  it  is  used  as 
breadstuff  in  Scandinavia,  Russia,  Germany,  and  to  a  smaller 
extent  in  southeastern  Europe,  and  is  beginning  to  be  used  in 
the  United  States  to  a  small  extent  in  the  preparation  of  break- 
fast foods,  for  invalids  and  as  an  ingredient  in  the  food  of  babies 
who  must  be  bottle-fed.  Its  admixture  with  wheat  flour  was 
very  important  in  Europe>  during  the  war.  The  shortage  in 
gluten  and  failure  to  make  sticky  dough  and  light  bread  limits 
its  use  in  the  countries  with  high  standards  of  living  chiefly 
to  forage  and  the  making  of  malt  for  beer,  for  which  it  has 
been  extensively  used  in  Germany,  England,  and  the  United 
States. 

I  have  seen  and  eaten  the  barley  loaf  made  by  the  cave- 
dwelling  Berbers  of  south-central  Tunis,  who  cultivate  small 
patches  of  barley  in  land  of  so  little  rainfall  that  they  count  on 
getting  only  one  good  crop  in  three  years.  The  barley  is  ground 
between  two  stones,  of  which  one  is  turned  by  hand;  it  is  then 


82       MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

mixed  with  water  and  salt.  A  handful  of  the  mixture  is  slapped 
against  the  vertical  side  of  a  big  earthen  jar  buried  in  the  earth, 
in  which  fire  has  burned  to  coals.  The  radiation  of  the  coals  and 
heat  of  the  earthenware  slowly  bakes  this  piece  of  nutriment, 
which  is  so  solid  that  if  a  man  were  hit  with  it  he  would  surely 
go  into  a  swoon,  and  so  solidly  nutritious  that  when  a  man  has 
eaten  his  fill  of  it  he  stays  full  for  the  space  of  about  two  ordi- 
nary meals. 

The  large  yield  makes  barley  a  substitute  for  corn  as  a  food 
for  hogs,  horses,  and  cattle  in  countries  that  cannot  grow  corn, 
such  as  Canada  and  Europe  north  of  the  Alps  and  the  Pacific 
slope  of  the  United  States.  In  England  and  Germany  it  occu- 
pies about  as  much  of  the  farm  land  as  wheat,  and  to  a  con^ 
siderable  extent  takes  the  same  place  in  farm  economy  that  corn 
does  in  the  American  corn-belt.  It  can  be  grown  in  the  United 
States  over  a  wide  range  of  territory,  but  it  pays  well  only  in 
certain  localities. 

The  temperature  range  of  barley  in  the  United  States  is  wider  than 
that  of  any  other  cereal.  It  is  grown  up  to  10,000  feet  elevation  in 
Colorado  where  the  summer  temperature  is  only  52°  and  frosts  are 
frequent,  and  it  is  grown  in  the  Imperial  Valley  of  southern  California 
where  the  summer  temperature  is  95°.  Barley  matures  on  an  annual 
rainfall  of  less  than  10  inches  in  California,  excelling  wheat  in  drought 
resistance;  but  does  not  endure  much  wet  weather.  In  general  the 
barley  regions  of  the  United  States  have  a  slightly  subhumid  to  semiarid 
climate,  with  plenty  of  sunshine.* 

IMPORTANCE  IN  ARID  LANDS.  Its  resistance  to  drought  makes 
barley  important  in  arid  lands,  such  as  those  around  the  Medi- 
terranean Sea,  Asia  Minor,  central  Asia,  Australia,  and  Cali- 
fornia, where  it  will  grow  nearer  to  the  desert  than  does  wheat. 
In  countries  having  winter  rain  and  summer  drought,  especially 
in  such  horse-loving  countries  as  Australia  and  California,  the 
barley  is  often  made  into  hay  by  being  cut  before  the  grain  is 
mature.  At  this  time  the  entire  plant  makes  good  forage.  In 
California  much  of  the  wheat  land  has  been  planted  to  raisins 
and  other  fruits,  and  the  wheat  crop  has  greatly  declined,  but 
the  barley  area  has  increased  and  barley  has  replaced  wheat, 

*  Finch,  V.  C.,  and  Baker,  O.  E.:  Geography  of  the  World's  Agriculture, 
p.  40. 


BARLEY  REGIONS  83 

as  a  market  grain,  probably  because  of  superior  resistance  to 
drought — a  factor  of  great  importance  in  a  state  with  so  much 
arid  land.  As  in  summer-dry  California,  so  also  is  it  important 
in  Spain  and  Algeria. 

Aside  from  California,  with  forty  million  bushels  (twenty- 
five  per  cent,  of  the  national  crop  in  1911,  eighteen  per  cent, 
in  1915),  the  only  barley  district  of  importance  in  the  United 
States  is  the  southern  end  of  the  spring  wheat-belt,  southern 
Minnesota,  and  the  Dakotas,  where  half  of  the  American  crop 
is  grown.  Some  barley  is  also  grown  in  eastern  Wisconsin, 
where  the  breweries  of  Milwaukee  have  long  given  a  nearby 
market.  The  fact  that  barley  ripens  earlier  than  wheat  is  a 
factor  of  very  great  importance,  because  the  two  crops,  one  food 
for  man,  the  other  food  for  beast,  do  not  compete  for  the  grower's 
time  at  harvest,  so  that  he  can  grow  a  larger  number  of 
acres  of  the  two  grains  than  he  could  of  either  alone.  The  supe- 
riority of  corn  as  a  forage  plant  in  the  more  humid  parts  of  the 
country  has  in  the  past  limited  the  total  production  of  barley  in 
the  United  States  (in  1911,  160  million  bushels;  in  1915,  228 
million,  about  one-fourth  the  amount  of  the  wheat  crop)  ;  but 
almost  cornless  Europe  grows  a  billion  bushels,  nearly  half  of  it 
in  Russia.  Little  Denmark,  with  her  many  cattle  and  hogs, 
grows  nearly  six  times  as  much  barley  as  wheat.  Esteem  for  it 
as  a  forage  plant  is  increasing  so  rapidly  in  the  United  States 
that  the  crop  has  doubled  within  fifteen  years,  and  the  increase 
is  steadily  mounting.  Its  recent  growth  in  Kansas  for  hog  feed 
suggests  its  substitution  for  corn  on  the  arid  edge  of  the  corn- 
belt.  The  fact  that  we  are  just  now  beginning  to  cultivate  large 
arid  areas  gives  us  good  reason  to  anticipate  a  great  increase  in 
barley  growing.  The  injury  of  this  crop  by  grasshoppers  is  a 
reason  why  it  has  not  already  made  greater  advances. 

The  Japanese  use  it  on  uplands  not  suited  to  rice.  Because 
of  its  heavy  yield,  it  is  the  second  cereal  of  Japan,  the  crop 
being  more  than  one-third  as  large  as  the  rice  crop,  and  three 
or  four  times  as  large  as  the  wheat  crop.  The  country  people 
of  Japan  eat  it  mixed  with  rice. 

Barley  flour,  with  its  excellent  flavor  and  nutritive  qualities, 
can  be  mixed  with  wheat  and  makes  good  bread,  as  the  experience 
of  hundreds  of  thousands  of  American  families  has  shown  dur- 


84       MINOR  CEREALS  OF  THE  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

ing  the  recent  wheat  shortage  in  the  United  States.  A  fifty  per 
cent,  mixture  of  barley  and  wheat  flour  has  been  successfully 
used  for  quick  hot-breads  and  biscuits  with  baking  powder.  The 
wheat  of  the  dry  countries  has  a  larger  gluten  content,  and 
therefore  permits  the  admixture  of  a  higher  percentage  of  barley, 
so  that  our  semi-arid  regions  hold  out  to  us  a  double  bread  prom- 
ise. Of  course,  if  we  had  to,  we  could  keep  as  healthy  on  barley 
bread  as  did  Jeremiah,  Hannibal,  Caesar,  or  Demosthenes.  We 
have  in  barley  one  of  the  easy  avenues  of  escape  from  any  possi- 
ble bread  famine. 

The  dietitians  are  constantly  hammering  away  to  make  people 
chew  their  starches  more  and  many  kinds  of  bread  and  biscuit 
are  advocated  because  they  are  baked  without  yeast  and  it  is 
necessary  to  chew  them  well.  Such  unleavened  breads  could 
easily  be  made  of  barley. 

4.  BUCKWHEAT.  Buckwheat,  an  unimportant  cereal,  even  more 
than  rye,  is  among  grains  as  the  goat  is  among  animals — con- 
spicuous for  its  ability  to  nourish  itself  where  the  supply  of 
nourishment  is  meager.  This  quality  habit  of  the  plant,  enabling 
it  to  live  on  the  poorer  and  rougher  lands,  in  combination  with 
its  very  short  period  of  growth,  makes  it  the  cereal  best  fitted 
for  growth  under  the  worst  conditions,  particularly  in  the  east- 
ern parts  of  the  United  States  and  northwest  Europe.  Buck- 
wheat does  not  resist  drought  well,  but  grows  well  on  rough,  cool 
mountain  lands.  The  plant  is  a  voracious  feeder,  exhausting 
the  soil,  but  this  makes  it  grow  so  quickly  that  it  can  be  sown  in 
midsummer  in  central  Pennsylvania  after  other  crops  have 
failed,  or  have  been  harvested,  and  yet  it  ripens  before  frost. 
One  climatic  weakness  of  buckwheat  is  its  inability  properly  to 
fertilize  its  blossoms  in  hot  weather,  which  makes  it  almost  neces- 
sary to  sow  it  after  the  heats  of  summer  are  past,  and  accounts 
for  some  surprising  failures  of  the  plant  to  produce  seed  in 
central  parts  of  the  United  States  and  in  the  spring-wheat 
country. 

Its  qualities  combine  to  make  it  a  crop  for  farms  of  rough 
and  mountainous  localities,  such  as  the  upper  part  of  the  Appala- 
chian Plateau  in  New  York  and  Pennsylvania,  parts  of  New 
England  and  Canada,  the  mountainous  districts  of  France,  the 
Alps,  Russia,  and  Japan.  The  excellence  of  the  buckwheat  flour 


NEW  CEREALS  85 

for  making  batter  cakes  is  well  known  in  the  United  States,  but 
the  Japanese,  who  grow  400,000  acres  and  make  of  it  a  very 
excellent  macaroni,  never  heard  of  buckwheat  cakes.  Apparently 
the  vogue  of  the  buckwheat  cake  is  declining  in  the  United 
States,  probably  on  account  of  the  onslaughts  of  our  manu- 
factured breakfast  foods,  and  the  grain  is  at  times  used  as  stock 
food.  Persons  who  keep  bees  for  the  large-scale  production  of 
honey  sometimes  grow  buckwheat  because  of  the  large  amount 
of  honey  in  the  flowers,  thus  getting  a  double  harvest. 

Our  buckwheat  acreage  of  1,250,000  just  after  the  Civil  War 
has  declined  to  750,000  acres.  New  York  and  Pennsylvania  pro- 
duce three-fourths  of  the  total  crop  of  the  United  States,  which 
amounts  to  about  three  per  cent,  of  the  wheat  crop. 

The  five  above-mentioned  grains  do  not  exhaust  the  list  of 
small  grains  even  of  the  temperate  zone.  Mr.  0.  F.  Cook,  of 
the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  reports  that  be- 
fore the  introduction  of  wheat  and  barley  into  South  America, 
the  quinoa,  a  cultivated  pigweed,  was  one  of  the  two  most 
widely  grown  crops  of  the  remarkable  Inca  civilization.  A 
Scotchman  resident  there  today  pronounced  it  better  than  oat- 
meal as  a  breakfast  food.  The  plant  appears  to  be  very  vigorous 
and  productive,  and  may  possibly  be  gathered  and  thrashed  by 
machinery.  There  is  no  immediate  prospect  of  this  plant's  enter- 
ing into  competition  with  our  other  small  grains,  but  the  plant 
breeders  have  not  yet  tried  their  hands  on  it.  Its  growth  on 
the  high  cold  plateaus  of  the  Andes  might  give  it  qualities  of 
value  in  many  other  parts  of  the  world  if  its  introduction  were 
seriously  attempted.  There  are  many,  many  varieties  of  wheat, 
rye,  barley,  oats,  and  buckwheat  yet  to  be  found  or  created. 
This  means  increased  yield  for  old  acres  and  new  crops  on  new 
acres — a  large  possible  increase  of  our  grain  supply,  and  there- 
fore of  our  bread  supply. 


CHAPTER  IV 
RICE 

RICE  CHARACTERISTICS  AND  RICE  CLIMATE 

THE  saying  that  bread  is  the  staff  of  life  arose  naturally  in  a 
country  where  man  had  bread,  and  for  the  same  reason  it  over- 
states the  case.  Hundreds  of  millions  of  men,  strong,  healthy, 
and  industrious,  never  heard  of  bread  as  we  know  it.  Bread 
is  merely  the  form  in  which  we  Occidentals  happen  to  get  some  of 
our  carbohydrate  nourishment.  The  hosts  of  non-bread  eaters  get 
carbohydrate  just  the  same,  but  in  other  forms,  one  of  which  is 
rice,  sometimes  called  the  greatest  of  all  the  cereals.  It  happens 
to  be  low  in  gluten,  and  therefore  will  not  make  light  bread. 
It  has  less  fat  and  less  protein  than  wheat,  two  facts,  however, 
which  help  it  to  keep  in  hot  damp  climates,  for  it  is  the  oil  in 
the  corn  germ  that  makes  corn  and  corn  meal  so  difficult  to  keep 
and  transport  in  bulk. 

In  the  adjustment  of  plants  to  different  climates,  nature  has 
fortunately  given  the  rice  plant  an  ability  to  survive  conditions 
fatal  to  the  successful  growth  of  the  grains  which  have  been 
the  great  dependence  of  the  white  races.  The  humidity  that 
debars  wheat  from  the  cotton-belt  and  makes  parts  of  that 
region  unsatisfactory  for  corn,  is  still  insufficient  for  rice,  which 
is  really  at  home  only  in  the  swamp,  the  kind  of  land  from 
which  the  white  man  has  mostly  run  away,  although  for  cen- 
turies and  millenniums  it  has  been  the  choicest  of  the  choice 
fields  in  the  rice-growing  lands  of  Buddha  and  Confucius. 

Without  rice  the  human  race  would  be  greatly  handicapped 
for  locally  grown  cereal  food  in  some  parts  of  the  warm  temper- 
ate zone  where  there  is  a  heavy  summer  rain,  as  along  the  Gulf 
coast  in  the  United  States,  and  also  in  the  torrid  zone,  especially 
equatorial  South  America,  equatorial  Africa,  the  East  Indies,  and 
great  stretches  of  the  southern  and  eastern  coasts  of  Asia.  In 

86 


CEREAL  OF  THE  SWAMP  87 

such  a  climate  all  the  European  grains — wheat,  barley,  rye,  oats, 
and  buckwheat — fail  miserably,  and  corn  is  far  from  its  best, 
owing  to  the  bad  effects  of  the  moisture.  Even  if  the  people 
could  afford  to  buy,  commerce  would  find  difficulty  in  filling 
the  gap,  because  it  is  so  difficult  to  keep  these  northern  grains  in 
a  hot  moist  climate.  Trouble  is  often  experienced  in  shipping 
corn  down  the  Mississippi  River  and  through  the  Gulf  of  Mexico 
to  Europe,  because  the  humidity  causes  the  grain  to  heat  and 
mold.  It  is  indeed  fortunate  that  these  climates  have  rice,  Asia's 
great  gift  to  the  world,  which  thrives  under  wet  summer  con- 
ditions anjl  which,  owing  to  the  dryness  of  the  kernels  and  a 
protecting  husk,  can  also  be  kept  without  deterioration. 

Rice  is  to  the  regions  with  wet  summers  what  wheat  is 
to  the  regions  with  dry  summers.  Rice  shares  with  wheat  the 
unusual  distinction  of  being  grown  almost  exclusively  for 
human  food.  It  probably  exceeds  wheat  in  this  respect,  for  a 
few  million  bushels  of  wheat  are  used  for  poultry  food,  as  noth- 
ing else  is  so  effective  for  egg  production.  The  two  plants  do  not 
thrive  in  the  same  region  unless,  as  in  a  few  districts  of  China 
and  Japan,  a  crop  of  winter  wheat  can  be  harvested  before  the 
beginning  of  the  summer  rains,  which  furnish  the  proper  con- 
ditions for  rice. 

There  is  one  other  kind  of  place  where  the  two  grains  flourish 
together,  namely,  a  dry  flood  plain  such  as  that  of  the  Nile,  the 
Sacramento  or  the  Po  rivers,  where  irrigation  can  make  enough 
moisture  for  rice,  in  a  wheat  climate.  In  the  main,  however, 
the  world's  rice  is  grown  in  the  reeking  humidity  of  a  moist 
summer  with  frequent,  almost  daily,  rains.  In  Louisiana  it  has 
been  found  that  the  rice  plant  requires  about  one-half  inch  of 
water  a  day  for  ninety  days;  and  since  the  rainfall  is  twenty 
inches  during  the  rice  season,  twenty-five  inches  must  be  put 
on  by  irrigation,  or  675,000  gallons  (over  5.000,000  pounds  per 
acre)  to  produce  1,500  to  2,000  pounds  of  rice.  * 

THE   ASIATIC    MONSOON   AND  THE   WORLD  *S   RICE 

Rice  has  been  grown  for  ages.  Centuries  ago  it  was  intro- 
duced into  Western  lands,  but  ninety-seven  per  cent,  of  the  crop 
is  still  grown  east  of  Suez,  the  waterway  through  which  the 


88 


RICE 


steamer  brings  to  the  Western  World  far  more  than  the  Western 
World  produces.  This  will  not  always  be  so,  for  rice  culture  in 
the  West  is  increasing.  Its  beginning  and  continuance  in  the 
East  has  a  very  natural  explanation :  the  Asiatic  monsoon,  a 
seasonal  summer  wind,  a  gigantic  sea  breeze,  blows  inland  from 


FIG.  33. — Transplanting  rice,  Philippine  Islands,  by  the  age-old,  Ori- 
ental, hand  method  in  the  flooded  fields.  Note  the  carabao,  or  water 
buffalo,  said  to  be  the  slowest  of  work  beasts. 

the  warm,  moist  Indian  and  Pacific  oceans  across  all  coast  lands 
between  the  upper  Ganges  Valley  and  latitude  51°  north  in 
Japan.  It  brings  to  eastern  and  southern  India,  Ceylon,  Bur- 
mah,  Siam,  and  Cochin-China,  the  Philippines,  China,  southern 
Korea,  and  Japan,  hundreds  of  millions  of  cubic  miles  of  steam- 
ing air  in  which  man  sweats  and  gasps  as  in  that  last  sticky  half- 
hour  before  an  American  thunder  shower.  Thus  these  countries 
have  heavy  warm  midsummer  rain — an  ideal  rice  climate. 

This  Asiatic  summer  rain  produced  by  the  monsoon  is  one  of 


OTHER  CHINESE  CEREALS  89 

the  most  important  factors  in  the  relation  of  man  to  the  earth. 
Southeastern  Asia  and  adjoining  islands,  the  region  of  monsoon 
climate  with  rice  as  the  leading  cereal,  is  the  home  of  more 
than  half  the  human  race.  An  important  reason  why  this  small 
corner  of  the  world  holds  so  many  people  is,  that  this  monsoon 
climate  brings  rain  at  the  season  of  greatest  heat  and  growth 
rather  than  in  the  cooler  period  of  least  growth,  as  in  California, 
Spain,  Italy,  Persia,  Australia,  South  Africa,  and  Chile,  with 
their  winter  rainfalls.  The  climate  possesses,  first,  the  inter- 
mittency  which  compels  people  to  work  during  the  non-produc- 
tive season  of  drought,  and  then  rainfall  enough  to  permit  the 
production  of  food  for  great  numbers. 

In  all  those  parts  of  southeastern  Asia  where  the  moisture  is 
sufficient  to  insure  satisfactory  growth,  rice  is  the  chief  cereal 
and  the  mainstay  of  the  population.  It  is  said  to  be  the  chief 
food  of  one-third  of  the  human  race;  but  the  extent  of  its 
use  has  been  somewhat  exaggerated  through  our  contact  with 
Oriental  people  at  seacoast  points  and  our  consequent  ignorance 
of  inland  districts,  especially  in  China.  The  rice  is  the  grain  of 
the  moist  low  plain,  and,  contrary  to  general  opinion,  it  is  a 
luxury  to  millions  of  Chinese  and  Japanese  who  live  on  the 
cheaper  and  less  desirable  millet,  corn,  and  potatoes,  both  sweet 
and  white,  the  European  small  grains,  and  other  cereals  not 
known  in  America. 

These  European  and  other  grains  are  raised  where  it  is  im- 
possible to  cultivate  rice.  Thus,  in  northwestern  India,  the 
valley  of  the  Indus  does  not  have  much  rain  and  is  an  important 
wheat-producing  region,  as  are  the  central  plateaus  of  India 
around  Bombay  and  upper  Bengal.  (See  Fig.  12.)  The  upper 
Ganges  is  a  great  barley  country.  In  north-central  and  northern 
China,  also,  rice  does  not  thrive,  and  wheat  is  extensively  grown. 
In  colder  or  more  arid  localities  comes  barley,  and  in  the  region 
of  Pekin  and  southern  Manchuria,  corn,  while  many  districts  of 
central  and  north  China  have  millet  as  their  chief  cereal.  South- 
ern Korea  depends  much  upon  rice,  while  in  the  rougher  and 
colder  north  they  grow  barley,  rye  and  oats,  millet,  and  some 
wheat;  the  same  practices  prevail  in  Japan. 

Wheat  and  barley  are  often  grown  on  rice  land  in  winter,  and 
the  two  grain  crops  per  year  measure  the  intensity  of  produc- 


90  RICE 

tion.  The  moisture  requirements  of  rice,  namely,  one-half  inch 
of  water  per  day,  are  so  great  that  irrigation  is  necessary  for  a 
dependable  crop  in  nearly  all  parts  of  the  world,  despite  man's 
efforts  to  find  productive  varieties  of  rice  that  will  thrive  on  up- 
lands. In  some  parts  of  the  Philippines,  the  summer  rain  of 
forty  to  sixty  inches  is  enough,  without  artificial  watering. 

The  rice  plant  has  been  grown  so  long  and  there  are  so  many 
separate  localities  having  little  intercourse  with  each  other,  that 
a  vast  number  (11,000  some  say)  of  separate  varieties  have  been 
produced.  These  may  be  grouped  into  two  classes :  hill  rice  and 
swamp  rice.  In  a  few  parts  of  the  Old  World  and  of  the  United 
States  a  little  rice  is  grown  without  irrigation  in  localities  of 
heavy  rainfall,  but  the  yield  is  less  than  one-half  that  of  ir- 
rigated rice,  which  produces  almost  all  the  world's  crop. 

Irrigation  of  rice  requires  that  the  water  must  stay  on  the 
land  for  some  time,  making  a  pond  in  which  the  rice  grows. 
This  requirement  necessitates  a  water-tight  subsoil.  The  best 
soils  for  rice  growing  have  a  tight  clay  subsoil  one  to  two  feet 
down,  with  a  friable  clay  soil  on  top.  This  condition  is  fur- 
nished especially  well  by  deltas,  and  rice  is  therefore  pre- 
eminently the  grain  of  the  delta,  as  may  be  seen  by  an  exam- 
ination of  the  crops  grown  on  the  deltas  of  the  Mississippi,  the 
Nile,  the  Yangtse  Kiang,  the  Ganges,  and  the  lesser  rivers 
of  India  and  eastern  Asia.  "Where  nature  has  not  been  so  kind 
as  to  level  off  the  land  ready  for  rice  growing,  as  in  deltas,  man 
has  in  some  places  expended  almost  inconceivable  labor  in  mak- 
ing his  farm  into  a  series  of  ponds,  into  which  and  from  which 
water  may  be  turned  at  will.  We  sometimes  count  the  pyramid 
of  Cheops  as  one  of  the  wonders  of  the  world,  one  of  the  great 
monuments  of  human  labor,  but  its  construction  was  child's  play 
in  comparison  to  the  work  done  on  paddy  fields  at  the  same  and 
later  periods  in  many  an  Oriental  sultanate. 

THE    ANTIQUITY    AND    USES    OF    RICE 

The  use  of  rice  in  these  old  lands  of  the  East  goes  back  to  the 
unknown  past.  Centuries  ago  rice  spread  from  China  and  India 
to  Egypt  and  north  Africa,  then  in  1468  to  Pisa  in  Europe,  and 
in  1694  the  governor  of  South  Carolina  succeeded  in  cultivating 


WORLD-WIDE  USE  91 

it  in  his  garden  and  thus  started  the  industry  in  the  United 
States.  A  little  rice  is  grown  throughout  nearly  all  tropical 
America  and  on  both  coasts  of  equatorial  Africa,  but  no  peoples 
depend  upon  it  so  fully  as  do  those  of  southern  and  eastern  Asia, 
with  whom  it  often  replaces  wheat,  potatoes,  and,  to  some  extent, 
meat  also.  Among  the  people  of  Europe  and  America,  rice  is 
used  as  an  ordinary  vegetable,  as  well  as  for  pudding,  and  as  a 
substitute  for  the  potato  in  periods  of  shortage  of  that  article  of 
diet.  It  keeps  better  and  is  more  convenient  to  transport  than 
the  potato.  In  keeping  qualities  it  is  the  peer  of  flour  and  the 
dried  bean,  and  can  be  used  anywhere.  It  is  consumed  through- 
out the  Western  World  from  Iceland  and  Lapland  to  Patagonia 
and  New  Zealand.  This  consumption,  along  with  its  use  in  the 
Orient  and  the  tropics,  probably  makes  it  the  most  widely  used 
of  human  foods.  It  is  easier  to  boil  rice  than  to  bake  bread. 
This  fact,  along  with  the  ease  with  which  it  may  be  kept  and 
carried,  makes  it  a  great  standby  in  the  tropics,  so  that  it  is 
said  to  be  the  staple  food  of  the  black  men  of  Hayti,  and  also 
of  the  white  men  of  Porto  Rico.  The  average  Porto  Rican 
eats  bread  once  a  day  with  his  morning  coffee.  The  chief  articles 
of  the  other  two  meals  are  rice,  dried  beans,  dried  codfish,  and 
mafafa,  a  kind  of  banana.  The  men  of  Hayti  and  Porto  Rico 
alike  have  been  almost  entirely  dependent  upon  the  swamps  of 
Asia  for  the  rice  they  eat,  paying  for  it  with  sugar,  cacao,  to- 
bacco, and  other  more  easily  grown  products. 

As  its  lack  of  gluten  keeps  it  from  being  a  bread  grain,  the 
Oriental  boils  rice  and  eats  it  in  that  form,  or  flavors  it  with  a 
bit  of  meat  or  fish  if  he  can  afford  it ;  or  uses  curry,  a  hot  season- 
ing preparation  made  in  endless  varieties.  With  peas  and  beans, 
rice  furnishes  almost  the  entire  nourishment  for  hundreds  of 
millions  of  people.  The  legumes  furnish  the  protein  that  the 
rice  lacks.  Peas  and  beans  are  widely  grown  by  almost  all 
Eastern  peoples  who  raise  rice,  and  they  are  the  substitutes  for 
the  meat,  milk,  and  cheese  of  the  West,  while  the  starch  of  rice 
is  the  substitute  for  bread,  potatoes,  and  many  puddings  as  well. 
The  unpolished  rice  eaten  by  the  Oriental  is  much  more  nutri- 
tious than  the  shiny,  white  grain  which  we  of  the  West  insist 
upon  eating.  The  process  of  polishing  it  takes  off  the  most  nour- 
ishing part,  and  is  one  of  the  numerous  cases  in  which  appear- 


92  RICE 

ance  leads  the  purchaser  to  select  the  really  inferior  article.  The 
Japanese,  with  their  general  adoption  of  Western  ways,  adopted 
from  us  the  habit  of  polishing  their  rice,  with  the  result  that 
the  Japanese  sailors  got  the  dreadful  disease  of  beri-beri,  much 
like  scurvy,  a  disease  of  malnutrition.  There  is  a  record  of  a 
man  supposed  to  be  dying  of  this  trouble  in  a  Japanese  hospital, 
who  was  given  a  single  dish  of  gruel  made  of  rice  bran,  with 
the  result  that  in  four  days  he  got  up  and  went  home.  The 
secret  seems  to  be  that  the  rice  hull,  like  the  outer  part  of  most 
grains,  has  in  it  mysterious  and  as  yet  largely  unknown  things 
known  as  vitamines.  While  we  do  not  know  much  about  their 
nature,  we  do  know  a  great  deal  about  their  work.  While 
not  nourishment  in  themselves,  vitamines  enable  us  to  get 
nourishment  out  of  food  that  otherwise  we  could  not  digest. 
They  seem  to  be  to  the  process  of  digestion  what  salt  and  other 
flavorers  are  to  a  good  meal.  Seasonings  are  not  a  part  of  the 
food,  but  they  give  the  flavor  that  makes  the  meal  a  pleasure. 
So  the  vitamines  are  not  a  part  of  nutrition,  but  they  are  essen- 
tial to  digestion.  The  polishing  of  the  rice  removed  this  element 
from  the  food  of  the  Japanese  sailor,  who  became  sick  at  sea, 
because  away  from  the  other  common  sources  of  vitamines  which 
are  so  abundant  in  nearly  all  green  foods. 

The  rice  bran  left  from  polishing  rice  is  a  valuable  cattle  food 
and  is  exported  as  far  as  Europe.  The  straw  is  used  for  many 
purposes,  including  fodder  for  animals,  and  the  hats  and  shoes 
worn  by  Oriental  workmen. 

BICE  GROWING  IN  THE  ORIENT 

Like  wheat  and  almost  any  other  crop,  rice  receives  careful 
cultivation  where  land  is  scarce,  and  careless  cultivation  where 
land  is  plentiful.  In  parts  of  the  East  Indies,  for  example 
Sumatra,  Borneo,  the  Malay  Peninsula,  and  in  some  parts  of 
Burma  and  Indo-China,  where  the  population  is  scanty  and  the 
tropical  jungle  covers  with  its  dense  tangle  every  foot  of  the 
land  except  where  man  has  fought  it  back,  and  keeps  it  back, 
upland  rice  is  grown  in  the  shiftless  manner  which  commonly 
prevails  wherever  a  sparse  population  uses  abundant  land. 

When  a  new  rice  field  is  wanted,  the  people  of  a  valley  begin 


STUPENDOUS  LABORS 


94  RICE 

the  year  by  cutting  down  the  forest.  Among  stumps  and  pros- 
trate logs,  often  higher  than  the  worker's  head,  the  upland  rice 
is  planted  in  holes  made  with  a  sharp  stick  and  filled  by  the  bare 
foot.  As  young  rice  is  much  prized  by  wild  animals,  the  ele- 
phant and  the  small  rodents  being  alike  partial  to  it,  the  clear- 
ing must  be  watched  until  the  harvest.  After  two  crops  of  this 
upland  rice  are  taken,  the  field  is  abandoned  for  a  fresh  field, 
and  the  tangled  jungle  promptly  reclaims  the  land. 

Most  of  the  countries  with  monsoon  climates  are  too  densely 
peopled  for  the  land  to  be  wasted  by  this  crude  method  of  rice- 
growing.  In  such  localities  the  land,  once  cleared,  is  cultivated 
for  centuries.  Dense  populations  nearly  always  grow  the  wet 
variety  of  rice,  because  of  its  greater  and  more  certain  yield. 
Few  crops  are  surer  than  the  wet  rice,  and  few  more  uncertain 
than  upland  rice — "providence  rice,"  they  call  it  in  Louisiana. 
It  is  doubtful  if  the  world's  agriculture  affords  a  more  per- 
fect adjustment  of  cultivation  to  natural  conditions  than  that 
of  rice  growing  in  a  swamp.  Ordinarily  flood  or  drought  con- 
stantly harass  the  European  and  American  farmer.  Too  much 
or  too  little  alike  destroys,  and  crops  are  rarely  at  maximum,  but 
in  the  rice  swamp  the  absolute  maximum  of  water  is  required 
and  supplied,  and  an  almost  perfect  adjustment  therefore 
prevails.  As  evidence,  note  our  national  average  grain  yields 
for  1917 — wheat,  14.2  bushels;  corn,  26.4  bushels;  rice,  37.6 
bushels.  Certainly  rice  is  the  king  of  grains  so  far  as  yield 
is  concerned — hence  its  importance  to  dense  populations.  Thus 
the  Japanese,  crowded  so  that  they  must  make  utmost  use  of 
land,  grew  in  1916  three  hundred  and  five  million  bushels  of 
rice  as  compared  with  one  hundred  and  eighteen  million  bushels 
of  three  other  small  grains — forty-five  million  of  barley,  forty 
of  rye,  thirty-three  of  wheat.  In  this  same  year  the  average 
yield  of  wheat  in  Japan  was  twenty-three  bushels,  and  of  rice, 
forty  bushels  per  acre. 

The  devices  used  to  make  and  keep  the  land  fit  for  this  service 
are  among  the  greatest  monuments  of  human  diligence  in  the 
world.  They  are  certainly  the  most  creditable  constructions 
produced  by  tropical  peoples,  the  only  rivals  being  the  slave- 
built  monuments  of  tyrants.  In  Ceylon,  for  example,  the  rail- 
way that  goes  from  the  seacoast  to  the  highlands  passes  through 


LOWLAND  RICE  95 

an  irrigated  plain  divided  by  low  banks  into  ponds  of  small 
area, — rice  fields,  each  of  which  has  by  great  labor  been  leveled 
so  that  the  water  may  be  of  uniform  and  proper  depth  for  rice 
growing.  As  the  railroad  climbs  the  slopes  of  the  hills  the  rich 
patches  continue,  with  smaller  area  and  higher  banks,  turning 
at  last  into  a  giant  flight  of  gentle  water  steps,  one  of  the  most 
beautiful  landscapes  in  the  world.  Many  mountains  in  Java 
are  similarly  terraced  for  rice  far  up  their  sides ;  and,  in  China 
and  Japan,  similar  stupendous  works  have  been  constructed  for 
the  nourishment  of  the  populations,  which,  like  those  of  Java 
and  of  Ceylon,  are  very  dense  and  mainly  dependent  upon  agri- 
culture, in  which  rice  is  the  largest  staple.  In  Japan  fifty-six 
per  cent,  of  the  arable  land  (11,000  square  miles)  is  laid  out  in 
these  irrigated  paddy  fields.* 

In  the  Philippines  some  of  the  mountain  tribes,  whom  we  in 
our  complacency  call  savages,  have  built  rice  terraces  with  an 
amount  of  labor  and  a  degree  of  perfection  nowhere  excelled.  In 
some  of  their  habits,  for  instance,  their  willingness  to  inflict 
suffering,  they  may  properly  be  called  savages ;  but,  if  they  looked 
at  the  gullied  corn  fields  of  the  United  States,  they  could  with 
great  propriety  say  that  we  are  agricultural  savages,  as  a  member 
of  the  Italian  senate  recently  said  of  his  own  countrymen  when 
he  looked  at  the  steep  and  eroding  wheat  fields  of  Sicily.  The 
irrigated  rice  field  is  permanent  agriculture.  The  eroded  grain 
field  of  the  West  is  self-destroying  agriculture. 

The  common  treatment  of  lowland  rice  is  alternately  to  flood 
it  and  to  draw  off  the  water  during  the  early  periods  of  its 
growth.  It  is  kept  under  water  during  a  larger  part  of  its 
development,  the  water  being  entirely  drawn  off  as  it  ripens. 
The  water  must  not  become  stagnant;  to  keep  it  in  motion  it  is 
the  common  practice  on  the  hillsides  to  lead  a  stream  to  the  top 
terrace,  and  let  the  water  pass  from  terrace  to  terrace  down 
the  slopes.  In  many  places,  especially  in  China  where  the 
water  supply  is  often  inadequate,  it  is  necessary  to  lift  the  water 
from  the  lower  terrace  to  the  higher  by  some  artificial  means. 
Sometimes,  where  the  water  is  abundant,  a  high  water  wheel  is 
used.  As  it  revolves,  the  bamboo  buckets,  mere  joints  of  bamboo 
on  its  rim,  empty  water  into  a  trough  when  they  reach  the  top 

*King:  Farmers  of  Forty  Centuries. 


96 


RICE 


of  the  wheel.  Only  in  exceptional  places  is  there  sufficient 
water  for  this  water-power  method.  In  many  parts  of  China 
and  India  two  men  may  be  seen  straddling  a  little  dyke  that 
separates  two  terraces.  With  a  bucket  they  dip  the  water  from 
the  lower  to  the  upper,  where  they  pour  it  out  upon  mats  so  that 
it  may  not  injure  the  little  rice  plants  beneath.  On  the  banks 
of  the  Nile  one  may  sometimes  see  a  string  of  three  or  four  men, 
one  above  the  other,  using  human  muscle  in  passing  water  from 


FIG  35, — Irrigation  in  Japan  by  foot  wheel  One  of  the  many  labori- 
ous means  by  which  the  Oriental  gets  the  precious  water  up  to  his  food 
patch.  (F.  H.  King,  Farmers  of  Forty  Centuries.) 

man  to  man  to  get  it  from  the  muddy  Nile  to  the  field  at  tlie 
top  of  the  bank. 

In  the  East  a  light  foot-driven  water  mill  is  another  very 
common  device,  by  which  human  muscle  does  the  work  which  we 
of  the  West  do  with  machinery  and  which  the  Oriental  may  in 
time  also  do  by  machinery. 

The  care  of  these  terraced  hillsides  with  their  accompanying 
menace  of  an  avalanche  of  water  is  as  great  a  monument  to  the 
diligence  and  patience  of  these  peoples  as  is  the  construction  of 
the  terraces.  Only  constant  vigilance  prevents  the  breaking  of 
the  upper  terraces,  which,  should  they  give  way,  would  promptly 
discharge  the  water  into  those  below  and  fill  them  to  overflowing, 
so  that,  gathering  force  as  it  went  down  the  hillside,  the  water 
would,  like  an  avalanche,  spread  death  before  it  and  leave  ruin 
behind. 


MAN  THE  BEAST  OF  BURDEN  97 

AMOUNT  AND  KIND  OF  LABOR  IN  GROWING  AND  PREPARING  RICE 

The  greater  part  of  the  rice  quite  naturally  is  grown  on  the 
level  delta  lands  where  the  paddies  are  separated  from  each  other 
by  low  banks,  and  the  bullock  or  water  buffalo  wallows  in  the 
mud,  dragging  the  plow  that  works  up  the  clay  into  a  thin  paste, 
before  the  rice  plants,  produced  in  small  sprouting  beds,  are 
transplanted  by  hand.  This  work,  like  much  of  the  other  work 
in  connection  with  terrace-grown  rice,  can  be  done  only  by  hand. 
The  small  fields  make  it  impossible  to  use  such  machinery  as  the 
reaper  or  even  at  times  the  ox.  But  beasts  of  burden  are  often 
unobtainable  in  a  densely  populated  country  like  China.  There 
is  not  land  enough  to  raise  food  for  many  animals,  so  the  spade 
in  the  hand  of  a  man  replaces  the  plow  drawn  by  a  beast,  and 
the-  garden  replaces  the  field.  Parts  of  China  and  Japan  and 
India  have  reached  the  ultimate  stage  of  agriculture,  where  man 
grows  by  his  own  labor  the  food  for  his  support,  and  there  is 
small  possibility  for  increase  of  food  production.  This  lack  of 
animals  is  by  no  means  universal,  for  there  are  millions  of  water 
buffaloes  plowing  rice  fields  in  tbe  Philippines  and  on  the  main- 
land of  southeastern  Asia ;  and  India,  inhabited  largely  by  people 
who  eat  little  or  no  meat,  has  more  cattle  than  the  United 
States — cattle  whose  chief  purpose  is  to  serve  as  beasts  of 
burden. 

When  the  Asiatic  rice  field  is  finally  drained,  the  ripened 
grain  is  usually  cut  by  hand,  tied  up  in  bundles,  and  allowed  to 
dry.  In  order  to  dry  them  in  moist  places,  it  is  often  necessary 
to  put  the  sheaves  upon  bamboo  frames.  The  grain  is  usually 
thrashed  by  hand  with  the  aid  of  some  very  simple  devices.  One 
of  these  is  a  board  with  a  slit  in  it.  Drawing  the  rice  through 
the  slit  pulls  the  grains  from  the  heads  and  allows  them  to  fall 
into  a  basket.  The  grain  at  this  stage  is  called  paddy  because 
of  a  close-fitting  husk  not  unlike  that  which  protects  the  oat 
kernel.  Like  oats,  rice  keeps  much  better  before  the  husk  is 
removed,  and  the  final  husking  is  always  deferred  until  the  time 
of  use  approaches.  Among  the  Oriental  people  the  husking  of 
the  paddy  to  prepare  it  for  food  is  a  daily  occurrence,  com- 
monly done  by  hand.  One  of  the  commonest  sounds  throughout 
the  East  from  Bombay  to  Manila  and  from  the  equator  to  Pekin 


98  RICE 

is  the  pounding  of  a  heavy  mallet  or  pestle  as  it  falls  into  a  vessel 
full  of  paddy. 


REGIONS  OF  GROWTH  AND  EXPORT 

It  is  probable  that  the  greatest  rice  grower  in  the  world 
is  China,  but  that  country  has  not  yet  the  habit  of  keeping  com- 
mercial statistics,  so  those  best  informed  can  only  guess  that  she 
grows  more  than  India,  whose  crop  of  a  billion  bushels  is  far 
greater  than  the  wheat  crop  of  any  country,  and  makes  the 
20  million  bushel  rice  crop  of  the  United  States  look  small 
indeed.  In  India  as  in  China  the  conditions  for  rice  growing 
are  to  be  found  only  in  scattered  localities,  because  of  the 
very  exacting  nature  of  the  plant.  Down  the  west  coast  of 
India  is  a  rice  region,  because  the  southwest  monsoon  blows 
squarely  against  the  nearby  western  Ghats  just  back  from  the 
coast,  making  summer  dampness  and  a  rainfall  of  from  seventy- 
five  inches  in  the  north  to  one  hundred  inches  on  the  Malabar 
coast  in  the  south.  On  the  east  coast  the  rainfall  is  less,  and  rice- 
growing  centers  around  the  deljas  of  the  four  rivers  Mahanadi, 
Godavari,  Kistna,  and  Cauvery.  In  the  presidency  of  Madras 
alone  some  11,500,000  acres  are  irrigated,  of  which  nearly 
2,000,000  are  irrigated  by  the  laborious  means  of  wells.  A  pair 
of  oxen  walk  down  a  ramp  pulling  a  rope,  which,  by  means  of  a 
pulley,  lifts  a  huge  bucket  of  iron  or  leather.  Thus  the  farmer 
gets  water  enough  to  irrigate  an  acre  or  two,  which,  because  of 
the  costliness  of  the  water,  he  must  tend  with  great  care  as  he 
grows  his  rice,  beans,  and  millet.  There  are  600,000  of  these 
wells  in  this  district  alone. 

The  greatest  rice  region  of  India  is  the  lower  Ganges  Valley 
with  its  wide  reaches  of  alluvial  soil  and  one  hundred  inches  of 
rain,  falling  mostly  in  the  summer  season.  Other  flood  plain 
areas  of  a  similar  nature  but  lesser  extent  are  furnished  by  the 
delta  plains  of  the  other  southeastern  Asiatic  rivers,  the  Irra- 
wadi  in  Burma,  the  Menam  in  Siam,  the  Mekong  in  Cochin- 
China,  making  trade  for  a  great  rice  port  at  the  mouth  of  each 
river.  Rangoon  in  Burma  is  the  greatest  rice  port  in  the  world, 
while  Bangkok  at  the  edge  of  the  Siamese  rice  delta  sends  out 
a  million  and  a  third  tons  per  year.  Rice  comprises  seventy- 


THE  RICE  TRADE 


99 


five  per  cent,  both  of  weight  and  of  value  of  the  exports  from 
the  port  of  Saigon  in  French  Cochin-China;  ten  mills  in  the 
nearby  town  of  Cholon  clean  a  million  tons  a  year  for  export. 
The  enormous  home  consumption  of  rice  in  China,  Japan, 
Java,  the  Philippines,  and  most  of  India  prevents  these  countries 
from  having  a  surplus  of  rice  for  export.  In  comparison  with 
wheat,  rice  is  quite  a  home  crop :  the  world  export  of  rice  in  1913 


FIG.  36. — It  should  be  noted  that  this  map  is  not  complete  because 
some  of  the  states  of  India  do  not  have  suitable  statistics  and  are  there- 
fore shown  by  shadings.  Note  sixe  of  unit.  (Finch  and  Baker.) 

was  270,000,000  bushels,  while  that  of  wheat  was  840,000,000. 
In  Burma,  Siam,  and  Cochin-China,  the  rice-growing  delta 
plains  contain  the  larger  part  of  the  population,  which,  however, 
is  less  dense  than  in  India  and  China,  so  that  large  quantities  of 
rice  are  left  as  the  money  crop  of  the  natives  who  grow  it  in 
these  unwholesome  swamps.  This  surplus  they  carry  in  their 
native  boats  down  through  the  winding  waterways  to  Bangkok, 
Rangoon,  and  Saigon.  Here,  in  the  mills  of  English,  French, 
Chinese,  and  (before  the  war)  Gernran  firms,  the  paddy  is 
cleaned  in  the  wasteful  fashion  demanded  by  Caucasian  con- 


100 


RICE 


sumers,  by  whom  the  part  eaten  is  only  half  as  nutritious  as  the 
part  consigned  to  the  animals  that  get  the  rice  bran. 

These  three  countries  of  southeastern  Asia,   Burma,   Siam, 
and  Cochin-China,  are  to  the  rice-shipping  world  what  western 

Canada  and  Argentina  are  to  the 
wheat-shipping  world — regions  of 
large  area  and  small  population, 
having  therefore,  a  surplus  for 
export,  but  playing  a  compara- 
tively small  part  in  the  world's 
production.  China  and  India 
proper  are  among  rice-growing 
nations  what  Europe  is  among 

f^\    ^\  JV    >/-^       wheat-growing  nations,  the  great- 
>     /          *\.    \C  est  producers,  with  almost  no  sur- 

\/  V     \^        plus.  India  produces  1,000,000,000 

bushels  and  exports  almost  none, 
while  Siam  produces  100,000,000 
and  exports  half  of  it.  Japan 
herself,  with  170  pounds  of  rice 

per  capita  as  compared  with  eight  in  the  United  States,  has  of 
late  entered  the  class  of  rice  importers,  despite  a  crop  of  300 
million  bushels  cultivated  with  the  greatest  care.  As  a  trader, 
Japan  imports  cheap  rice  for  home  consumption  and  exports 
her  own  fine  quality  grain. 


FIG.  37. — Each  dot  repre- 
sents 2,500  acres.  (Finch  and 
Baker. ) 


THE  SPREAD  AND  EXTENT  OF  RICE  GROWING 

Rice  came  into  the  West  late  in  history  and  thus  far  the  de- 
velopment of  rice  growing  outside  the  Orient  has  been  slow  and 
small.  The  annual  overflow  of  the  Nile  due  to  seasonal  rains  in 
central  Africa,  and  the  resulting  easy  irrigation,  make  rice  as 
much  at  home  as  it  is  in  the  garden  farms  of  Japan,  the  lower 
valley  of  the  Yangtse  Kiang,  or  the  terraces  of  Ceylon  and  Java. 
Some  rice  is  grown  in  Egypt,  but  not  enough  for  the  population, 
probably  because  of  the  European  dominance  of  the  Egyptian 
agriculture.  Europe  unfortunately  lacks  the  natural  facilities 
for  extensive  rice  growing,  or  she  would  doubtless  long  ago  have 
developed  it.  Only  southern  Europe  has  a  climate  warm  enough, 


RICE  IN  THE  OCCIDENT  101 

and  there  the  Mediterranean  climate  with  its  dry  summer  pre- 
vails, so  that  little  rice  can  be  grown.  Wherever  water  can  be 
found  in  sufficient  quantity  to  meet  the  needs  of  rice,  little 
patches  of  it  are  cultivated  in  Spain,  Portugal,  and  Greece,  but 
only  in  the  level  valley  of  the  Po  where  Alpine  snows  feed  the 
streams  is  there  a  European  rice  region  worthy  of  mention,  and 
its  production  is  not  sufficient  to  supply  the  Italian  demand.  Al- 
though rice  is  a  standard  article  of  diet  in  every  country  of 
America  and  Europe  and  in  every  European  colony,  all  these 
lands  are  importers,  with  the  possible  exceptions  of  Peru  and 
Brazil.  In  Peru  the  combination  of  Chinese  immigration  and 
irrigation  has  caused  a  production  one-tenth  as  great  (1916)  as 
that  of  the  United  States,  and  in  Brazil  the  scarcity  due  to  the 
war  caused  home  production  suddenly  to  increase  until  in  the 
first  six  months  of  1917  there  was  an  export  of  20,000  tons. 

RICE    GROWING    BY   ASIATIC    EMIGRANTS 

The  emigration  of  East  Indian  laborers  to  the  islands  of 
Mauritius  and  Reunion  in  the  Indian  Ocean  has  introduced 
rice  growing  there,  while  similar  people,  lately  taken  to  the 
British  colonies  of  Jamaica,  Trinidad,  Honduras,  and  Guiana, 
have  carried  with  them  the  methods  practised  by  their  rice-grow- 
ing ancestors  for  a  hundred  generations.  Of  these  tropical 
American  rice  fields  British  Guiana  has  the  best.  Here,  although 
the  country  is  mostly  uninhabited  forest,  are  large  stretches 
where  the  leved,  alluvial  swamp  along  the  seashore  has  been 
utilized  by  the  building  of  dykes,  after  the  manner  employed  in 
Holland.  The  country  was  settled  by  the  Dutch  and  later  ceded 
to  England.  The  reclaimed  land  greatly  resembles  the  rice- 
growing  deltas  of  the  rivers  of  southern  Asia,  and,  since  the 
decline  in  the  profits  of  sugar  growing,  the  East  Indian  workers 
of  Guiana  are  growing  ever  larger  quantities  of  rice.  Between 
1898  and  1908  the  acreage  increased  from  6,000  to  38,000  and  to 
48,000  in  1916. 

RICE  GROWING  IN   THE   UNITED   STATES 

After  the  surprising  success  of  the  governor  of  South  Carolina 
in  raising  a  patch  of  rice  in  his  garden  in  1693,  rice  growing 

LIBRARY 

gTAT"  T^/C    £R  S  C    L   EGE 
§A..TA  BARBARA.  CALIFORNIA 


102 


RICE 


became  an  industry  in  that  colony  and  in  Georgia,  since  swamps 
along  the  seacoast  and  rivers  could  cheaply  be  dyked  off  and  cul- 
tivated by  negro  slaves  in  the  Oriental  way.  They  were-irrigated 
by  river  water  and  drained  at  any  low  tide.  In  1787,  negro 
slaves  were  more  profitable  in  this  region  than  in  any  other  of 
the  thirteen  colonies,  and  it  was  due  to  the  influence  of  Georgia 


UNITED  STATES 

RICE 
ACREAGE.  1909 


FIG.  38. — Compare  the   significance   of   each  dot   in  this  map  with   that 
of  Fig.  36.      (Finch  and  Baker.) 

and  Carolina  rice  growers  that  slavery  received  its  recognition 
in  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States. 

These  two  states  have  grown  rice  of  excellent  quality  down  to 
the  present  day,  but  they  are  now  suffering  from  the  competition 
of  newer  and  more  interesting  rice  fields,  those  upon  plains  near 
the  Gulf  coast  not  far  from  the  boundary  between  Louisiana  and 
Texas  and  upon  the  flood  plains  of  eastern  Arkansas.  Here 
are  lands  wonderfully  level,  with  a  very  satisfactory  clay  sub- 
soil to  keep  water  from  soaking  through.  By  dams,  wells,  and 
pumping  plants,  the  irrigation  water  is  mechanically  sup- 
plied, after  the  ground  has  been  plowed  and  harrowed  by 
teams  and  cultivators  akin  to  those  used  in  the  preparation  of 
large  areas  of  wheat  land.  This  method  is  made  possible  by  hav- 
ing the  dykes  gently  sloping  so  that  teams  can  be  driven  across 
them.  After  the  water  has  been  drawn  off  at  ripening  time,  the 


INTERNATIONAL  COST  COMPARISONS  103 

ground  is  firm  enough  and  the  area  large  enough  to  permit 
reaping  machines  to  harvest  the  rice  like  wheat,  and  steam 
thrashers  to  throw  off  the  chaff  and  straw  into  piles,  and  to  fill 
the  rice  sacks  as  quickly  as  they  fill  wheat  sacks.  This  conquest 
of  the  primeval  Oriental  hand-labor  garden  crop  by  American 
farm  machinery  has  enabled  one  man  to  take  care  of  eighty 
acres  of  rice  in  a  year,  and  though  he  is  paid  twenty  times  as 
much  as  the  Chinese  laborer,  he  produces  rice  more  cheaply 
because  the  Chinaman,  by  his  arduous  hand  labor,  cares  for  only 
a  little  patch  of  land. 

Farm  wage 

Acres  per  with  board  Labor  cost 

laborer  per  year  per  acre 

Japan                        %  to  1  $10  to  $18  $10  to  $36 

China                         %  to  2%  8  to  12  4  to  6 

India                                3  10  to  20  4  to  7 

Egypt                              4  15  to  30  4  to  8 

Italy                                5  40  to  60  8  to  12 
United  States: 

Carolina                       8  96  to  120  12  to  15 
Mississippi 

Delta                      10  120  to  144  12  to  14 

Louisiana-Texas            80  160  to  240  2  to  3 '      . 

1  Geography  of  the  World's  Agriculture,  Finch  and  Baker,  p.  47. 

This  new  rice  region  grows  many  times  as  much  rice  now  as 
the  more  expensively  managed  swamps  along  the  South  Atlantic 
Coast,*  and  it  is  possible  that  before  long  the  United  States 
will  become  a  rice  exporter  rather  than,  as  now,  an  importer. 
But  it  will  take  a  good  many  years  for  the  American  rice- 
growers  to  become  acquainted  with  their  new  industry  and 
acclimated  (if  possible)  to  the  necessarily  damp  climate  which 
accompanies  the  irrigation  of  land  upon  the  warm  and  moist 
shores  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico. 

The  land  is  peculiarly  adapted  to  rice — almost  as  level  as  a 
floor,  underlaid  by  impervious  clay  at  an  average  of  fifteen  to 

*  Th«:  deadly  effect  of  this  machine  competition  is  shown  by  the  rice 
acreage  in  South  Carolina— 17,000  acres  in  1910,  .3,000  in  1917— a  striking 
counterpart  of  the  abandoning  of  wheat  fields  in  eastern  Canada  and 
eastern  United  States  after  the  railroad  and  the  reaper  reached  the  cheap 
and  level  West. 


104: 


RICE 


eighteen  inches  below  the  surface,  while  water-bearing  gravel 
sixty  to  two  hundred  and  fifty  feet  deeper  furnishes  abundant 
water  for  irrigation  where  rivers  do  not  suffice.  In  the  immedi- 
ate vicinity  of  the  Mississippi  the  irrigation  is  facilitated  by  one 
of  the  peculiarities  of  flood-plain  rivers.  In  times  of  flood  these 
streams  drop  their  mud  most  heavily  near  their  banks,  which 
thus  become  the  highest  part  of  the  plain  and  therefore  slope 

away  from  the  stream  bank 
so  that  the  rice  planter  draws 
water  from  the  river,  which  is 
higher  than  his  field,  and  lets 
it  out  to  run  back  into  the 
swamps,  which  begin  from 
one  to  three  miles  away  from 
the  river  itself. 

This  area  of  rice  land  runs 
from  the  Colorado  River  in 
Texas  500  miles  northeast- 
ward into  the  Mississippi 
delta  in  Louisiana,  and  ex- 
tends about  sixty  miles  in- 
land, with  an  average  eleva- 
tion of  from  six  to  forty  feet. 
It  is  plain  that  with  our  acre- 
age of  964,000  in  1917  we 
have  but  begun  to  utilize  our 
Gulf  Coast  rice  area.  But  the 
value  of  land  formerly  worth 
$3  or  $4  an  acre  has  rapidly 
risen  to  $50  or  $60  an  acre. 
Meanwhile  another  area  of  rice  fields,  with  rapidly  increasing 
acreage,  has  been  established  in  east-central  Arkansas,  although 
its  ultimate  possibilities  cannot  be  so  large  as  those  along  the 
Gulf  Coast.  This  Arkansas  district  was  land  made  worthless 
for  ordinary  culture  by  June  freshets  along  the  rivers  flowing 
out  of  Kansas  and  the  Ozarks. 

The  most  interesting  of  all  the  rice  areas  in  the  United  States, 
however,  as  well  as  the  newest,  is  in  California  on  the  delta  of 
the  Sacramento  River,  where  in  six  years'  time  the  acreage 


FIG.  39. — Each  dot  represents  five, 
hundred  acres  of  rice  and  of  course 
covers  actually  much  more  than  that 
area  on  the  map.  (Finch  and  Baker.) 


NEW  RICE  REGIONS  105 

increased  from  1,400  to  80,000  acres,  and  rice  of  the  finest  quality 
is  produced.  California's  average  on  these  new  lands  in  1917 
reached  the  astounding  figure  of  seventy  bushels,  whereas  the 
United  States  average  was  37.6  bushels,  and  that  of  Louisiana, 
with  more  than  half  the  total  acreage,  was  36.5  bushels.  The 
ultimate  possible  acreage  in  California  with  its  Sierra  snow-field 
water  must  be  but  a  small  fraction,  however,  of  the  acreage  of 
the  Gulf  Coast. 

THE  FUTURE  SUPPLY   OF  RICE 

There  is  every  reason  to  believe  that  the  world  can  double, 
triple,  quadruple,  and  still  further  multiply  its  rice  crop,  which 
at  present  amounts  to  about  2,500,000,000  to  3,000,000,000  bush- 
els. Most  of  the  land  in  the  tropics  is  undeveloped.  Extending 
around  the  world  at  the  equator  and  for  a  considerable  distance 
north  and  south  of  it,  almost  everywhere  that  land  appears,  is  a 
zone  of  dense  forests,  flourishing  in  the  rice  climate.  This  great 
belt  is  almost  untouched.  In  only  one  portion  of  it  is  rice  grown 
to  any  appreciable  extent,  and  that  is  in  Java,  which  may  be 
taken  as  an  object-lesson.  The  extension  of  rice  growing  by 
machinery  in  the  temperate  zone  may  be  duplicated  in  the  torrid 
zone.  The  recent  purchase  by  the  French  Government  of  a  forty- 
five  horsepower  caterpillar  tractor  for  experiment  on  the  rice 
lands  of  Cochin-China  is  exceedingly  suggestive.  So  is  the  sud- 
den export  of  20,000  tons  of  rice  from  Brazil  in  1917,  when  for  a 
few  seasons  the  Brazilians  could  not  go  to  Paris  to  spend  their 
money,  and  the  price  of  rice  was  high.  If  white  men  stop  fight- 
ing and  utilize  science  and  machinery  to  develop  the  tropics, 
there  is  no  reason  why  the  70,000,000  acres  of  rice  land  in  India 
cannot  be  duplicated  over  and  over  again  in  the  vast  wet 
stretches  of  Brazil,  Peru,  Bolivia,  Venezuela,  Guiana,  Congo, 
Siam,  Borneo,  Papua,  Sumatra,  and  North  Australia.  These 
countries  resemble  the  few  spots  that  now  produce  rice  for 
export.  The  doubling  of  the  rice  crop  in  Congo  in  1916  is  sug- 
gestive and  even  prophetic. 

There  appears  to  be  no  reason  why  the  tractor  may  not  permit 
us  to  grow  great  acreages  of  rice  without  irrigation.  It  is  true, 
this  method  will  not  be  so  productive  as  irrigation,  but  neither 


IOC  RICE 

will  it  be  so  costly,  and,  as  explained  in  the  discussion  of  wheat, 
with  cultivation  by  tractor  men  can  afford  large  acreages  at 
lower  yields  than  with  existing  methods.  It  is  also  true  that  the 
plant  breeders  can  doubtless  greatly  improve  the  ability  of  hill 
rice  to  survive  moderate  drought.  Recent  fertilizer  experiments 
from  Hawaii  are  also  indicative  of  enlarged  future  yields.  Ni- 
trate of  soda,  the  standard  source  of  nitrogen,  had  been  used  at  a 
loss;  but  the  crop  was  doubled  by  applications  of  sulphate  of 
ammonia,  a  comparatively  new  fertilizing  material  produced 
from  the  by-product  coke  oven,  a  source  from  which  we  can  get 
almost  unlimited  quantities  of  fertilizer  while  coal  lasts;  and, 
when  coal  is  gone,  any  source  of  mechanical  power,  of  which 
there  are  many  yet  untouched,  will  enable  us  to  get  nitrogen 
from  the  air  to  feed  the  rice-plants  which  feed  us. 

Therefore  it  seems  plain  that  if  in  future  decades  we  should 
develop  an  actual  shortage  of  wheat  and  of  the  other  small 
grains  of  the  north,  the  lands  of  the  equator  can  be  called  upon 
to  produce  for  us  an  almost  unlimited  quantity  of  rice. 


CHAPTER  V 
CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSITUTES 

THE    VALUE   OF    CORN    TO    THE   SETTLERS    AND    PEOPLE    OF    AMERICA 

FROM  the  American  point  of  view,  corn  has  been  well  called 
the  king  of  crops.  It  is  the  greatest  crop  on  American  farms 
to-day.  It  saved  the  civilization  of  New  England  in  the  winter 
of  1621,  and  again  in  a  different  way  in  1918.  It  is  said  that 
the  corn  procured  from  the  Indians  by  the  Pilgrim  fathers  in 
the  dreadful  winter  of  their  first  landing,  1620-21,  saved  them 
from  famine,  and  American  agriculture,  based  on  corn,  enabled 
the  Western  World  to  withstand  the  German  onslaught  in  the 
third  and  fourth  years  of  the  Great  War. 

When  the  first  American  settlers  landed  in  Massachusetts  and 
Virginia,  the  Indians  were  using  this  valuable  grain,  which  the 
settlers  called  Indian  corn,  corn  being  the  English  word  for 
grain.  The  Spanish  called  it  maize. 

Its  growth  and  use  by  the  natives  of  America  extended  over 
much  of  this  continent  from  the  northern  limit  by  climate  in  New 
England  to  the  upper  limit  by  altitude  in  Arizona,  Mexico,  and 
Peru.  The  European  colonists,  to  their  great  benefit,  at  once 
began  to  cultivate  it,  because  it  was  so  much  easier  to  grow 
than  wheat,  barley,  rye,  and  oats,  with  which  they  had  been 
acquainted  at  home.  These  small  grains,  grass-like  in  their  early 
growth,  require  for  their  satisfactory  cultivation  smooth  land 
free  from  stumps  and  stones.  This  the  new  settler  in  the  woods 
did  not  have.  But  the  Indian  showed  him  how  to  kill  the  trees 
by  cutting  the  bark,  so  that  he  could  immediately  plant  corn 
among  the  standing  trunks  and,  with  a  little  rough  cultivation, 
have  unripe  corn  ears  for  roasting  as  early  as  August — a  much 
quicker  return  for  his  labor  than  wheat  could  possibly  bestow. 
By  September  or  October  the  settler  would  have  ripe  grain  that 
would  stand  a  month  or  two  awaiting  his  convenience  to  harvest 

107 


108 


CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 


it.  It  would  even  stand  on  the  stalk  most  of  the  winter  unless 
eaten  by  non-carnivorous  wild  animals,  such  as  the  squirrel,  the 
rabbit,  the  opossum,  the  raccoon,  and  the  deer.  In  this  respect 
it  was  superior  to  the  small  grains,  which  must  be  harvested  at 


FIG.  40. — Cross-section  of  corn  grain  much  enlarged. 
(University  of  Illinois.) 

once  lest  storms  beat  them  down.  The  corn,  moreover,  yielded 
twice  as  much  as  the  wheat,  was  easily  kept,  and  could  be  served 
as  food  in  many  forms — as  parched  corn,  made  by  heating  the 
whole  grain  in  a  frying  pan  or  over  an  open  fire;  as  hominy, 
which  is  the  grain  thoroughly  boiled  after  the  outer  layer  is 
removed  by  soaking  in  lye  leached  from  ashes;  as  mush  (samp), 
made  by  boiling  the  meal ;  or,  finally,  as  corn  bread.  The  husk 


CORN  FOR  THE  FRONTIER  109 

that  had  protected  the  ear  was  used  in  the  mattress  of  the 
colonist's  bed;  the  stalks  and  blades  fed  the  horses  and  cows 
through  the  winter,  even  after  serving  for  months  as  a  thatch 
for  the  temporary  shed  that  shielded  the  animals  from  storm. 
Unfortunately  the  poor  Indian  had,  before  the  white  man  came, 
no  domestic  animal  stronger  than  the  dog.  Therefore  he  could 
not  plow,  and  he  had  not  enough  metal  even  for  a  good  hoe,  so 
that  his  growth  of  corn  depended  chiefly  on  exceedingly  crude 
tools — the  stone  hatchet  to  mash  the  bark  of  a  tree,  or  fire,  to  kill 
it,  and  a  sharpened  stick  to  plant  the  grain  in  the  leaf  mold 
of  this  small  and  temporary  field  in  the  forest.  The  first  Massa- 
chusetts explorer  who  reached  the  Connecticut  River  tells  in  his 
journal  that  he  saw  forty  Indian  canoes  loaded  with  corn  shoot 
the  rapids  at  Holyoke.  The  Indians  had  found  a  good  piece  of 
rich  glacial  soil  near  Becket,  Massachusetts,  which  now  raises  300 
bushels  of  potatoes  to  the  acre.  Here  they  grew  corn  for  carriage 
to  lower  river  points  as  far  as  the  Long  Island  Sound. 

USEFULNESS  OF  CORN  IN  ROUGH  COUNTRIES  LIKE  APPALACHIA 

Owing  to  its  ability  to  grow  on  very  rough  land  where  the 
other  grains  will  not  do  so  well,  nor  yield  so  much,  corn,  where 
the  climate  permits,  is  the  mainstay  of  primitive  or  isolated  hill- 
peoples  in  many  parts  of  the  world.  On  the  central  Appa- 
lachian Plateau  of  eastern  Kentucky,  eastern  Tennessee,  and  West 
Virginia,  for  example,  where  many  counties  covering  several 
thousand  square  miles  are  entirely  devoid  of  railroads  or  good 
wagon  roads,  the  primitive  conditions  of  the  Revolutionary  period 
continue,  and  corn,  both  as  food  and  a  staple  of  commerce,  is  of 
greatest  importance,*  covering  twenty-five  per  cent  of  the  crop 
area. 

*  This  locality  with  its  inferior  corn  crop  furnishes  a  good  example  of 
the  influence  of  environment  on  history  Almost  the  only  means  of  export- 
ing corn  from  this  district  of  unending  roof-steep  slopes  is  by  converting 
it  into  whisky  or  livestock.  Owing  to  the  fact  that  the  United  States 
Government  taxes  whisky  a  dollar  a  gallon  there  has  been  a  century- 
long  struggle  between  the  collector  of  revenue  and  the  illicit  distiller, 
the  "moonshiner"  as  he  is  called,  of  the  Appalachian  Mountains.  The 
mountaineer  feels  that  it  is  a  tyranny  for  the  Government  to  tax  the 
most  profitable  thing  he  can  sell.  This  feeling  took  its  strongest  form 
in  Washington's  administration,  when  the  people  of  western  Pennsylvania, 
objecting  to  the  tax,  rose  in  insurrection  against  the  new  Republic  in 


110  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

CORN  AS  FOOD 

i 

Despite  the  use  of  corn  as  food  for  an  unknown  period  by 
the  aboriginal  inhabitants  of  two  continents,  despite  its  early 
importance  to  the  white  settlers  of  the  United  States  and  its 
wide-spread  use  in  many  parts  of  the  world,  its  value  as  a  food- 
stuff has  declined  rather  than  advanced  in  that  part  of  the 
world  most  busily  engaged  in  world  trade,  namely  the  northern 
United  States  and  northwestern  Europe.  There  is  no  question 
about  the  excellence  of  corn  as  food.  History  settles  that.  Analy- 
sis shows  that  it  closely  resembles  wheat.  The  marching  records 
of  regiments  of  corn-fed  Southern  soldiers  in  the  American  Civil 
War,  corroborate  the  evidence  of  millions  of  workmen  in  the 
Southern  States  that  corn  is  good  and  sustaining  food.  Whit- 
tier  in  the  middle  of  the  last  century  celebrated  the  dish  of 
samp  (corn-meal  mush)  and  milk.  The  well-to-do  sons  of  Har- 
vard University  named  one  of  their  clubs  the  "  Hasty  Pudding 
Club."  Nevertheless,  the  more  glutenous  wheat  with  its  better 
keeping  bread  has  won  the  day.  I  have  even  been  told,  by  intelli- 
gent people,  after  a  year  of  campaigning  by  the  American  Food 
Administration  to  persuade  the  American  people  to  eat  corn  and 
of  showing  them  how  to  eat  it,  that  corn  is  the  cause  of  pellagra 
in  the  South.* 

Our  prejudice  against  corn  is  for  most  of  us  a  part  of  the  uni- 
versal prejudice  against  the  new;  but  it  is  weak  in  comparison  to 
that  of  many  European  countries.  Prejudice  against  corn  is, 

the  so-called  "  Whisky  Rebellion."  More  successful,  however,  has  been 
the  generation-long  work  of  the  illicit  distiller,  who,  in  some  hidden 
recess,  converts  a  sack  of  corn  into  a  few  jugs  of  whisky  for  stealthy  sale. 
So  strong  is  public  sentiment  in  some  of  these  localities  that  the  man 
who  serves  in  the  Federal  prison  for  breaking  the  revenue  laws  or  shooting 
the  revenue  officer  is  a  local  hero  on  his  return. 

"  Pellagra. — This  disease  has  been  common  in  parts  of  Europe  for 
centuries  ...  It  was  first  observed  in  America  in  1907,  and  has  been 
steadily  on  the  increase,  especially  in  certain  of  the  Southern  States. 
.  .  .  Goldberger  has  accomplished  a  great  work  in  demonstrating  that 
diet,  when  properly  constituted,  causes  the  disappearance  of  pellagra,  and 
prevents  its  recurrence  His  dietary  studies  have  demonstrated  beyond 
a  doubt  that  a  faulty  diet  is  the  most  important  factor  in  causing  the 
development  of  the  condition.  He  has  shown  that  when  liberal  amounts 
of  milk  and  eggs  and  of  meat  are  introduced  into  the  diet  of  institutions, 
such  as  insane  asylums  and  orphanages,  in  which  the  disease  was  pre- 
viously common,  they  become  free  from  it  even  though  new  rases  are 
admitted  freely  and  the  sick  are  mingled  with  the  well." — E.  V.  McCollum 
in  The  Newer  Knowledge  of  Nutrition,  pp.  103,  106,  107. 


EUROPE  EATS  CORN  111 

however,  by  no  means  world-wide.*  The  poorer  portion  of  the 
populations  of  Portugal,  Spain,  and  Italy  long  since  found  out 
that  they  can  be  fed  more  cheaply  on  corn  than  on  wheat,  and 
millions  of  them  almost  live  on  it  either  in  the  form  of  bread  or 
mush,  which  the  Italians  call  polenta.  I  have  been  told  by  the 
English  owners  of  Portuguese  estates  that  within  recent  years 
they  have  contracted  with  large  numbers  of  workers,  chiefly 
women,  from  north  Portugal,  to  come  to  central  Portugal  for  the 
winter  months  and  grub  bushes  from  beneath  the  cork  trees.  The 
conditions  were  wages  of  $3  a  month  in  American  gold,  a  cabin 
where  the  workers  could  sleep  on  beds  of  boughs  around  a  central 
fire,  and  all  they  wanted  to  eat  of  a  boiled  mixture  consisting  of 
fifteen  parts  of  corn  meal  and  one  part  of  olive  oil.  Out  of  gen- 
erosity the  employer  gave  one  square  meal  a  month  of  fish,  white 
bread,  and  vegetables.  This  was  evidently  better  fare  than  the 
people  were  accustomed  to  at  home,  for  they  came  in  the  autumn 
thin  and,  after  a  winter's  work,  went  back  in  the  spring,  fat. 

The  science  of  compounding  new  foods  and  the  practice  of 
factory  preparation  is  causing  corn  to  creep  back  to  a  small  but 
increasing  extent  into  the  dietary  of  America  and  even  of  other 
countries,  in  the  form  of  prepared  breakfast  foods.  Americans 
now  eat  an  average  of  fifty  to  sixty  pounds  of  corn  per  capita 
per  year.  Green  corn,  the  so-called  roasting  ear,  is  widely  used 
in  the  United  States  for  a  short  season  in  late  summer.  Canned 
green  corn  is  also  in  favor  throughout  the  year;  twenty-five 
million  cans  a  year  are  now  manufactured  in  the  United  States, 
and  the  quantity  is  steadily  increasing. 

The  war  shortage  has  caused  corn  oil  (Mazola)  to  appear 
suddenly  on  our  grocery  shelves  as  a  substitute  for  olive  oil. 

Two  other  food  supplies  of  wide-spread  use  are  made  from 
corn:  corn-starch  and  karo,  or  corn  syrup,  which  is  glucose,  a 
liquefied  sugar  manufactured  from  corn-starch  and  recommended 
by  food  experts  as  being  a  thoroughly  wholesome  substitute  for 
sugar  or  other  more  expensive  syrups.  The  same  grain  of  corn 

* "  Americans  used  to  respond  with  a  shipload  of  corn  whenever  an 
appeal  camo  from  famine  sufferers  in  Armenia,  Russia,  Ireland,  or 
Austria,  hut  their  generosity  was  chilled  when  they  found  that  their  gift 
was  resented  as  an  insult  or  as  an  attempt  to  poison  the  impoverished 
population,  who  declared  that  they  would  rather  die  than  cat  it — and 
some  of  them  did." — Edwin  E.  Slosson,  The  Independent,  March  9,  1918, 
p.  416. 


112 


CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 


produces  in  the  factory  both  starch  and  oil.  Meanwhile  most 
of  the  world's  corn,  like  most  of  the  world's  oats  and  barley, 
goes  to  feed  our  four-footed  servants,  the  farm  livestock.  The 


Relation  between  the  July  Rainfall  and  the  Yield  of  Corn,  1888-1915 


The  solid  line( )inclicates  the  departure  of  the  average  rainfall  from 

the  normal  for  the  month  of  July,  over  the  following  named  States,  for 
the  28  years  indicated;  Ohio,  Indiana,  Illinois,  Iowa,  Nebraska,  Kansas, 
Missouri  and  Kentucky. 

The  broken  line(-— — )  shows  the  departure  of  the  average  yield  of  corn 
from  the  normal,  in  bushels  per  acre  for  the  same  nrea.  and  period. 


FIG.  41. — The  relationship  between  July  rain  and  moisture  and  the 
corn,  yield  seems  to  he  as  absolute  as  the  relationship  between  June 
temperature  and  wheat  yield  in  Dakota.  (Wm.  G.  Reed,  United  States 
Weather  Bureau.)  See  Fig.  8. 

total  per  capita  corn  consumption  for  this  purpose  in  the  United 
States  is  about  twenty-eight  bushels  per  year  and  in  Canada  four 
bushels. 


CLIMATIC   REQUIREMENTS    OF   CORN 

Corn  is  a  crop  of  the  warm  moist  summer.  It  will  mature  if 
there  is  a  five-months  growing  season  and  a  hot  midsummer  with 
sufficient  rainfall  to  keep  up  the  growth  of  the  plant,  which  at 
times  amounts  to  several  inches  a  day.  Where  conditions  are 
very  favorable,  and  a  giant  variety  is  selected,  it  will  in  a  few 
weeks  reach  a  height  of  from  five  to  fourteen,  and  occasionally 
even  twenty,  feet.  The  speed  of  growth  and  size  of  the  plant, 


CORN  AND  SHOWERS  113 

which  in  a  few  weeks  passes  from  knee-high  to  head-high  or  more, 
makes  it  require  much  material  for  its  development;  it  is  there- 
fore very  dependent  upon  the  proper  conditions  for  growth.  As 
this  great  rush-growth  of  corn  in  the  American  corn-belt  takes 
place  during  the  month  of  July,  this  period  is  peculiarly  critical, 
especially  as  the  corn  plant  passes  quickly  to  maturity,  whether 
conditions  are  favorable  or  not.  Thus  August  rains  will  not  save 
the  crop  that  suffered  from  July  droughts.  Mr.  J.  Warren  Smith, 
of  the  United  States  Weather  Bureau,  states  that  in  every  year 
when  the  rainfall  in  Ohio  has  averaged  less  than  three  inches  in 
July,  the  corn  yield  has  averaged  30.3  bushels  to  the  acre,  and  in 
every  year  when  the  July  rainfall  has  been  five  or  more  inches 
the  corn  yield  has  averaged  38.1  bushels  to  the  acre.  He  also 
found  that  an  increase  in  rainfall  from  three  inches  to  three  and 
one-half  resulted  in  an  increase  of  four  and  one-third  bushels 
to  the  acre.  If  we  apply  these  calculations  to  the  corn  crop  for 
five  leading  states  in  the  corn-belt  in  1917  (Iowa,  11,100,000 
acres;  Illinois,  11,000,000  acres;  Nebraska,  9,240,000  acres; 
Kansas,  9,156,000  acres;  Missouri,  7,200,000  acres)  we  find 
that  one-half  inch  of  rain  might  be  worth  206,628,667  bushels  of 
corn,  worth  at  the  present  time  $258,000,000  ($1.25  per  bushel). 
Other  studies  show  that  the  corn  plant  is  almost  equally 
dependent  upon  heat,  most  of  the  world's  crop  being  produced 
in  a  region  where  the  mean  summer  temperature  is  between 
70°  and  80°,  with  a  night  temperature  of  at  least  58°.  So 
important  is  the  influence  of  heat  on  corn  that  very  little  of 
this  crop  is  raised  where  the  mean  summer  temperature  is  less 
than  66°,  or  the  average  night  temperature  during  three  months 
less  than  55°.  Where  it  has  the  right  temperature  conditions  it 
ordinarily  ripens  in  Kansas  in  130  days,  and  in  Ohio  in  140  days. 
In  a  cool  season,  however,  its  development  is  slow,  as  in  the  year 
1917,  when  unusually  cool  weather  caused  eighteen  per  cent,  of 
the  crop  to  be  in  the  dough  stage  when  frost  came.  Ordinarily 
but  four  per  cent,  is  caught  in  this  condition  by  frost.  Regions 
with  a  cool  summer,  such  as  England,  Scotland,  France,  in  fact 
all  of  northern  Europe,  most  of  New  England  north  of  latitude 
44°,  and  Canada,  excepting  a  part  of  Ontario,  cannot  well  pro- 
duce a  crop  of  ripened  corn.  The  heat  requirement  of  the  maize 
plant  includes  warm  nights  as  well  as  warm  days,  so  that  many 


114 


CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 


arid  regions  having  very  hot  days  and  cool  nights,  such  as 
Nevada,  are  not  suited  to  the  profitable  production  of  corn, 
despite  an  apparently  satisfactory  average  temperature. 

Although  a  lover  of  heat,  corn  often  does  not  do  its  best  in  the 
continuous  heat  of  the  tropics,  because  of  lack  of  water  and  of 


5      6       7       f       9      10     11     12    13     14     15     16     17     1»    19     20     21     22     23     24     25     26     27 


srfc 


—  —  —  —  —  -tifowtb  of  Cor 


r   i 


J i L 


A\ 


79 

78  E 
77  5 
76  1 
75  g 
74  S 
73 
72 
71 
70 


FIG.  42. — Relation  between  maximum  temperature  and  daily  growth 
of  corn  in  Pennsylvania,  July  5-27,  1889.  The  great  fall  in  the  growth 
of  corn  when  the  thermometer  went  from  84  to  70  shows  how  definitely 
corn  is  a  warm-summer  crop.  (J.  Warren  Smith,  United  States  Monthly 
Weather  Review.) 

humus  in  the  soil.  The  yield  is  larger  in  the  latitude  of  the 
central  temperate  zone  than  in  its  warmer  parts  or  in  the  tropics, 
even  though  conditions  may  appear  to  be  similar  during  most  of 
the  growing  season.  For  a  ten-year  period  the  average  produc- 
tion of  Louisiana  corn  was  16.3  bushels  per  acre,  while  that  of 
Wisconsin  was  33.2  bushels  per  acre.*  The  cultivation  of  corn  is, 
however,  widely  scattered  throughout  the  warmer  parts  of  the 
world  between  45°  north  latitude  and  40°  south  latitude,  and 
it  is  quite  likely  that  science  applied  to  agriculture  can  make  the 
yield  in  Louisiana  equal  that  in  Illinois  or  Wisconsin. 

The  chief  regions  of  large-scale  production  may  be  divided  into 
seven  zones:  the  upper  Mississippi  Valley,  the  United  States 

*  Some  vegetables  of  the  beet  family  produce  nothing  but  loafy  tops  in 
the  continuously  warm  West  Indies,  although  the  nourishment  stored  in 
then  thick  roots  for  the  next  year's  seed  growth  makes  them  an  essential 
feature  of  agriculture  in  Canada,  Sweden,  England,  France,  and  Germany, 
and  other  lands  of  frost  and  cool  summers.  Is  corn  subject  to  this 
influence?  J 


DISTRIBUTION  OF  AMERICAN  CORN 


115 


116  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

cotton-belt,  tropical  America  including  Mexico,  the  Black  Sea 
basin,  the  Mediterranean  countries,  southeastern  Asia,  and  the 
Parana  Valley  of  South  America. 

THE  AMERICAN   CORN-BELT 

Of  these  the  first  and  most  important,  indeed  more  important 
than  all  the  others  combined,  is  that  of  the  upper  Mississippi 
Valley,  the  so-called  corn-belt  of  the  United  States.  Three- 
fourths  of  the  world's  corn  is  grown  in  the  United  States,  and 
three-fourths  of  the  American  crop  is  grown  in  the  Mississippi 
Valley.  Corn  is  grown  from  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  to  the  Great 
Lakes,  and  from  the  Atlantic  Ocean  to  western  Kansas  and  in 
scattered  areas  beyond,  but  the  region  of  greatest  production,  the 
corn-belt  proper,  reaches  from  central  Ohio  to  central  Nebraska, 
and  from  Kentucky  and  central  Missouri  into  southern  Wiscon- 
sin and  southern  Minnesota.  It  includes  all  the  state  of  Iowa, 
nearly  all  of  the  states  of  Illinois  and  Indiana,  Ohio,  and  about 
half  of  Missouri,  Kansas,  and  Nebraska.  The  region  is  one  of  the 
finest  agricultural  sections  in  the  entire  world.  Hundreds  of  miles 
of  almost  level  prairie  are  rarely  varied  by  undulations  steep 
enough  to  interfere  with  the  laying  out  of  roads  on  meridians 
and  parallels  at  regular  intervals  of  one  mile.  This  soil  that 
lies  so  satisfactorily  for  tillage  is  naturally  fertile,  and  so  free 
from  stones  that  the  worker  can  ride  the  cultivator  with  which 
he  tends  the  corn.  Most  of  these  cultivators  till  both  sides  of  one 
row  of  corn,  and  some  of  them  even  take  two  rows  of  corn  at 
once.  Thus  a  farmer  unaided  can  cultivate  a  large  area  of  corn, 
in  many  cases  more  than  forty  acres,  and  produce  the  grain  that 
was  so  cheap  for  many  years.  Serious  droughts  are  infrequent 
in  the  corn-belt.  The  abundant  rainfall  of  summer  comes  in 
short  showers  which  do  not  seriously  interfere  with  agricul- 
tural operations,  and  the  heat  is  sufficient  for  an  excellent 
growth  of  corn. 


CORN  IN  FARM  ECONOMY  117 

RELATION  OF  CORN   TO  OTHER  PRODUCTS  OF   CORN-BELT 

Corn  is  not  the  only  crop  in  the  corn-belt.  On  a  single  farm 
there  may  be,  in  addition  to  corn,  fields  of  wheat,  oats,  and  hay 
which  require  the  farmer's  labor  at  different  seasons  from  that 
of  the  corn  (see  section  on  oats)  ;  also  there  may  be  a  field  of 
grass  upon  which  cattle  can  graze. 

A  surprisingly  small  portion  of  the  corn-belt  grain  goes  directly 
to  the  market  as  grain.  In  the  parts  of  the  corn-belt  farthest 
distant  from  the  great  markets,  as  Iowa  and  Kansas,  the  major 
part  of  the  corn  is  grown  as  a  supply  crop  (a  crop  used  on  the 
farm),  is  fed  to  the  farm  animals,  and  goes  to  market  in  the 
more  condensed  forms  of  beef,  pork,  mutton,  horses,  mules,  and 
poultry.  Near  the  great  markets,  where  the  transportation  is 
cheaper,  as  in  Illinois,  the  proportion  of  grain  sent  directly  to 
market  is  much  greater.  In  1910,  forty-eight  per  cent,  of  the 
corn  of  Illinois  was  shipped  out  of  the  county  where  it  was 
produced.  In  Kansas  the  corresponding  figure  was  twenty-two 
per  cent. ;  in  Texas,  yet  farther  from  markets,  it  was  seven  per 
cent. 

THE  IMPROVEMENT  AND  EXTENSION  OF  CORN   GROWING 

Conditions  in  corn  growing  improve  from  year  to  year  as  the 
scientific  agriculturists  breed  new  and  better  varieties  and  select 
the  seed  according  to  the  known  laws  of  heredity.  In  a  recent 
corn  test  in  Illinois  one  large  field  yielded  forty-eight  bushels  to 
the  acre  and  a  similar  adjacent  field  yielded  seventy-seven  bush- 
els to  the  acre ;  the;  only  difference  in  conditions  was  the  superior, 
well-selected  seed  that  produced  the  larger  crop.  The  breeding 
of  earlier  ripening  kinds  will  doubtless  make  possible  a  greater 
growth  of  corn  in  northern  parts  of  the  United  States  and  in 
southern  Canada,  where  it  is  not  now  a  dependable  crop.  Its 
culture  is  slowly  creeping  northward  into  the  cold,  westward  into 
the  drought,  and  southward  into  the  land  erstwhile  monopolized 
by  cotton  and  ''Molly  Cottontail."  At  present  it  is  grown  in 
Canada  only  near  the  Great  Lakes  and  in  much  of  the  northern 
part  of  the  United  States  it  is  of  little  importance. 

Another  means  of  extending  the  area  and  value  of  corn  pro- 


118 


CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 


duction,  especially  in  cool  climates,  is  offered  by  the  silo.  This 
device,  recently  introduced  from  France,  is  a  barrel-like  struc- 
ture, ten  to  thirty  feet  in  diameter,  made  of  wood  or  concrete. 
Its  use  is  rapidly  increasing,  because  by  it  the  entire  corn  plant, 
stalk,  blade,  ear,  and  husk,  when  chopped  into  bits,  may  be  kept 
moist,  warm,  and  edible  for  cattle  for  one  or  two  years.  In  this 
form,  called  silage,  corn  makes  its  greatest  possible  food  return 


FIG.  44. — A   good  measure  of  the  advancing  season   and  of  the  agri- 
cultural advantages  of  the  South.      (U,  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

to  ruminant  animals,  is  much  used  in  the  feeding  of  dairy  and 
beef  cattle,  and,  since  it  can  be  put  away  some  weeks  before  it  is 
fully  matured,  can  be  grown  much  farther  north  than  can  the 
ripened  grain,  which  can  be  kept  only  after  fully  maturing  in 
the  field. 

It  is  difficult  to  appreciate  the  full  possibilities  of  the  silo  as 
a  factor  in  the  increase  of  American  animal  industries,  especially 
the  milk  supply,  for  which  the  succulent  silage  is  so  well  suited. 
No  other  easily  grown  crop  is  the  equal  or  half  the  equal  of  corn 
as  coarse  forage,  and  the  silo  easily  cuts  two  to  three  weeks  off 
the  corn  season  and  therefore  permits  the  grain  to  be  grown  in  a 
wide  belt  to  the  north  and  west  of  the  existing  corn-belt,  in  a 


SILAGE— A  REVOLUTION  119 

region  where  the  seasons,  shortened  because  of  frost  and  drought, 
do  not  permit  it  to  ripen  its  grain,  but  do  permit  it  to  make  a 
stalk  and  perhaps  start  the  ear.  The  silo,  which  was  a  novelty 
in  many  American  localities  in  1900,  has  now  become  as  common 
in  these  same  places  as  the  Ford  automobile.  A  few  years  ago 
along  a  road  nine  miles  long  just  west  of  the  Adirondacks  in 
New  York  State  there  was  one  silo ;  at  the  end  of  a  decade  every 
farm  but  one  along  that  same  road  had  a  silo.  This  wonderful 
barn  even  helps  corn  to  cross  the  Canadian  boundary  in  the 
Red  River  Valley  of  the  North  and  to  extend  to  the  great  plains 
of  the  United  States. 

In  the  short  summer  of  parts  of  New  England,  the  silo  helps  in 
a  suggestive  industrial  combination.  While  corn  may  not  ripen, 
it  easily  and  surely  gets  ready  for  table  use — the  so-called  roast- 
ing-ear  stage — so  that  from  a  field  of  sugar  corn,  wagon  loads 
of  ears  may  go  to  the  canning  factory  or  the  vegetable  market 
and  the  stalks  may  be  put  into  the  farmer's  silo  to  feed  his  dairy 
cattle — an  important  improvement  in  systematic  agriculture. 
Moreover,  the  canned  corn  of  the  North  is  in  some  markets  recog- 
nized as  of  superior  quality,  because  the  cool  climate  delays 
ripening  and  gives  it  a  longer  period  in  the  edible  milky 
condition. 

CORN  IN  THE  COTTON-BELT 

Corn  is  the  crop  second  in  importance  in  the  cotton  lands  of 
the  South,  but  cotton  is  so  overwhelmingly  the  main  crop  that 
the  corn  crop  is  often  insufficient  for  local  use,  and  import  from 
the  corn-belt  is  necessary.  This  is  not  the  case  in  Florida, 
southern  Alabama,  and  Mississippi,  where  cotton  is  little  grown 
and  corn  covers  over  half  the  crop  area.  Corn,  but  little  used  as 
human  food  in  the  northern  half  of  the  United  States,  is  in  com- 
mon use  in  the  Southern  States  and  is  often  the  chief  bread- 
stuff of  white  and  black  alike. 

The  production  of  corn  in  the  Southern  States  is  rapidly 
increasing  because  of  its  high  price,  because  of  the  injury  to 
cotton  by  the  boll  weevil,  which  makes  another  crop  necessary, 
because  of  the  high  price  of  meat  products  that  can  be  produced 
by  the  corn,  and  lastly,  because  of  the  systematic  attempt  to 


120 


CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 


promote  science  in  agriculture.,  The  states  of  the  American 
cotton-belt,  probably  because  of  their  shockingly  wasteful  agri- 
culture, have  led  their  Northern  neighbors  in  the  development  of 
the  county  farm  demonstration  service.  By  this  service  each 
county  has  one  or  more  officials  whose  sole  task  it  is  to  promote 
in  every  possible  way  better  crop  production  and  better  life 


FIG.  45. — Barn  wflh  masonry  silos.     The  chopped  corn  goes  up  the  pipe 
by  air  pressure.     (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

conditions  among  the  people.  Among  their  activities  is  the 
promotion  of  boys'  corn  clubs  and  pig  clubs,  and  girls'  tomato 
and  chicken  clubs.  The  yield  of  corn  on  these  school-boy  acres, 
often  twice  or  thrice  that  produced  by  their  fathers,  and  four 
or  five  times  that  of  the  state  average,  has  been  so  astonishing 
as  to  result  in  a  distinct  improvement  in  crop  yield  throughout 
large  districts.  Thus  the  yield  in  North  Carolina  between  1896 
and  1905  was  13.4  bushels  to  the  acre;  in  the  next  decade,  1906 
to  1915,  18.3  bushels.  In  the  same  time  the  yield  in  South 
Carolina  rose  from  9.5  bushels  to  16.7,  an  increase  of  forty-three 
per  cent. ;  in  Georgia  the  yield  increased  from.  10.5  to  14  bushels. 


INCREASING  THE  YIELD  121 

Examination  of  the  figures  within  this  last  decade  of  education 
proves  the  increase  to  be  progressive.  Thus  in  North  Carolina 
in  its  first  two  years  the  decade  showed  an  average  of  15.9 
bushels,  while  in  the  last  two  years  the  average  was  20.7  bushels. 
There  is  no  reason,  except  human  shiftlessness,  to  which  all 
mankind  is  more  or  less  inclined,  why  this  increase  in  yield 
should  stop  until  it  has  reached  forty  or  fifty  bushels  per  acre 
in  North  and  South  alike.  There  are  in  almost  every  township 
of  the  United  States  farmers  who  regularly  make  yields  of  wheat, 
corn,  and  other  crops  that  are  twice  and  sometimes  even  thrice 
the  national  or  local  average  of  that  crop.  These  men  have  no 
patent.  They  merely  utilize  well-known  facts  in  a  careful  way. 
The  demonstration  service  in  the  South  has  diffused  that  knowl- 
edge; and  one  of  the  first  steps  of  the  1917  campaign  in  the 
United  States  for  more  food  was  to  put  one  of  these  experts  in 
nearly  every  county  in  the  United  States. 

AMERICAN   CORN  EXPORTS 

America  has  often  exported  a  hundred  million  bushels  of  corn 
annually,  and  sometimes  has  doubled  that  amount,  to  north- 
western Europe,  where  the  grain  is  fed  to  farm  animals,  includ- 
ing work  horses.  It  is  almost  always  sent  from  the  region  of 
heaviest  production  in  our  corn-belt,  after  being  assembled  in  the 
markets  of  St.  Louis,  Kansas  City,  Omaha,  or  Chicago.  From 
these  points  it  passes  by  lake  steamers  and  the  Erie  Canal  or  by 
railroads  to  the  Atlantic  ports  between  Norfolk  and  Montreal 
for  export  by  the  North  Atlantic  steamships.  A  smaller  amount 
goes  to  Gulf  ports,  but  they  are  not  desirable  stations  from  which 
to  export  corn  because  of  the  humidity  and  heat  of  the  Gulf. 

At  various  times  before  the  Great  War,  exporters  of  corn  from 
the  United  States  have  unsuccessfully  attempted  to  spread  the 
habit  of  corn-eating  among  the  peoples  of  northern  Europe.  At 
the  present  time,  owing  to  the  necessities  of  war,  there  are  doubt- 
less many  more  corn  eaters  in  Europe  than  ever  before.* 

*  In  Switzerland,  for  example,  the  Italian  portion  of  the  population  has 
been  eating  corn  for  a  long  while;  and  during  the  food  scarcity  of  th« 
war  tho  government  has  encouraged  substitution  of  corn  bread  for  wheat. 
It  has  been  used  in  all  official  institutions,  and  the  poor  people  were  per- 
mitted to  bay  it  at  twenty  per  cent,  below  normal  price.  Cook-books  have 


122  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

The  American  corn  export  has  declined  of  late  from  195 
million  bushels  per  year  in  1896-99  to  fifty  million  bushels 
1910-11,  and  even  the  Great  War  has  been  unable  to  increase 
it,  although  the  crops  of  1916  and  1917  were  2.5  and  3.1  billion 
bushels  respectively.  This  decline  in  export  is  not  due  to  crop 
failure,  for  the  average  crop  in  1896-99  was  2,040  million 
bushels  and  in  1910-11  it  was  2,719  million  bushels.  With  an 
increasing  population  we  have  a  per  capita  consumption  that 
rose  from  twenty-six  bushels  in  the  first  period  to  about  thirty- 
one  in  the  later  period.  As  we  have  no  new  corn  lands  to  turn 
to  and  some  of  the  old  ones  are  declining  in  natural  productivity, 
we  seem  to  have  reached  the  end  of  an  era  of  cheap  corn.  When 
Kansas  corn  land  was  worth  $10  to  $25  an  acre  there  was  plenty 
of  corn  to  be  had ;  it  was  at  times  cheaper  than  coal  and  was 
burned  by  the  farmer  as  fuel  in  the  family  stove.  We  have 
opened  no  corn  frontiers  since  1895  and  the  price  is  rising  from 
natural  causes.  It  was  about  thirty-four  cents  on  the  Chicago 
market  in  1899.  Ten  years  later  it  was  sixty-seven  cents,  and 
the  influence  upon  the  European  buyer  was  shown  by  the  decrease 
in  our  exports  during  that  decade  from  213  to  38  million 
bushels.  The  lessened  corn  export  has  helped  to  drive  up  the 
price  of  other  stock  foods,  producing  world-wide  price  disturb- 
ance and  industrial  adjustments.  The  war  has  sent  the  price  of 
corn  and  its  derivative,  meat,  to  prices  heretofore  unheard  of 
outside  of  beleagured  cities;  in  the  post-war  period  the  prices 
will  stay  relatively  high  because  of  the  great  demand  for  the 
products  in  which  corn  appears  on  the  market — pork,  beef, 
mutton,  horse,  mule,  milk,  butter,  cheese,  poultry,  eggs.  More 
corn  can  be  had  only  by  the  use  of  more  intelligence,  and 
especially  of  more  labor,  both  of  which  mean  increased  cost. 

been  issued  tolling  people  how  to  prepare  it  in  nourishing  and  agreeable 
forms;  consequently  it  is  now  frequently  seen  in  homes,  hotels,  and 
restaurants.  The  prejudice  against  it  seems  to  have  been  expelled,  and 
it  is  almost  certain  that  its  use  as  food  will  be  greater  after  the  war 
than  before,  even  when  the  old  ratios  between  grain  costs  are  reestablished. 
(Sea  United  States  Commerce  Report,  July  7,  1917.) 


CORN  AS  STAFF  OF  LIFE  123 

CORN    IN    TROPICAL  AMERICA   AND    MEXICO 

The  Spanish-American  highlands,  reaching  from  the  boundary 
of  the  United  States  to  Argentina,  comprise  the  third  corn- 
growing  zone.  No  corn  is  exported  from  these  countries  and  little 
is  raised  for  farm  stock,  since  the  animals  graze  the  year  round. 
In  every  one  of  them — Mexico,  the  five  Central  American  coun- 
tries, and  Colombia,  Venezuela,  Ecuador,  Peru,  and  Bolivia — 
the  majority  of  the  population,  native  Indians  or  half-breeds 
who  live  in  the  higher  altitudes,  derive  a  surprising  amount 
of  their  nourishment  from  corn  and  beans.  Many  of  these 
Indians  and  half-breeds,  known  as  peons,  have  a  very  low 
standard  of  living.  The  simplest  shelter  suffices;  and,  rather 
than  work  much,  they  content  themselves  with  beans,  one  of  the 
most  easily  grown  of  vegetables,  and  corn,  the  cereal  which  they 
can  most  easily  and  cheaply  grow.  In  Mexico  and  other  of 
these  countries  the  commonest  form  of  corn  bread  is  the  "tor- 
tilla" or  hot  corn  cake  which  can  be  baked  over  an  open  fire. 
This  monotonous  diet  is  made  acceptable  by  a  flavoring  of  pepper, 
which  the  people  eat  in  quantities  that  seem  appalling  to  the 
foreigner  who  tries  their  dishes.  It  is  said  that  the  flesh  of  a 
Mexican  peon  is  so  impregnated  with  pepper  that  if  he  dies  in  the 
wilderness  the  coyote  will  not  eat  him.  For  similar  reasons 
cannibals  complain  that  white  man  tastes  of  salt  and  tobacco. 

In  these  mountainous  Latin-American  countries  the  lowlands 
are  scantily  peopled,  the  population  living  chiefly  on  the  plateaus 
where  most  of  the  land  is  hilly.  The  corn  fields  are  usually 
small,  and  the  production,  which  is  almost  always  for  local  con- 
sumption, resembles  the  family  garden  rather  than  the  broad 
fields  of  the  American  corn-belt.  Some  of  these  plateau  patches 
arc  of  great  fertility.  It  is  said  that  there  are  certain  fields  in 
Ecuador  where  the  soil,  made  of  dust  blown  from  the  volcanoes 
Chimborazo  and  Cotopaxi,  and  with  the  usual  richness  of  lava 
soils,  has  yielded  crops  of  corn  continuously  for  200  years. 
There  is  no  prospect  that  corn  will  ever  be  grown  for  export 
from  these  countries  in  any  important  quantities.*  As  their  in- 

*  Venezuela  exported  a  little  corn  to  the  United  States  in  1917,  under 
the  stimulus  of  war  prices,  but  there  is  little  immediate  prospect  of  its 
playing  any  large  role. 


124  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

dustries  expand  they  will  develop  other  resources.  All  Mexico 
north  of  San  Luis  Potosi  (lat.  22°)  is  importing  more  and  more 
corn  as  its  mineral  resources  and  railroads  give  employment  to 
workers.  The  climate  in  most  parts  of  the  Mexican  highland 
region  north  and  west  from  the  city  of  Mexico  is  too  dry  for 
corn  without  irrigation,  so  that  while  this  crop  covers  over 
thirty  per  cent,  of  the  total  crop  land,  the  yield  is  less  than 
fifteen  bushels  per  acre.  The  crop  is  grown  chiefly  on  the  outer 
slopes  of  the  highlands  at  about  the  latitude  of  the  southernmost 
bend  of  the  Gulf  of  Mexico. 

Among  the  negro  population  of  the  West  Indian  islands,  corn 
is  widely  used  for  food,  but  not  enough  is  grown  for  home  use, 
and  here,  as  sometimes  in  Yucatan,  there  is  a  relatively  large 
import  of  corn  and  corn  meal  from  the  United  States. 

THE   CORN   REGION  OF   THE   BLACK   SEA  BASIN 

The  corn  zone  second  in  importance  to  the  United  States  corn- 
belt  is  that  of  the  lower  Danube  Valley  and  adjacent  districts 
of  the  Black  Sea  Basin  in  southeastern  Europe,  comprising  part 
of  Hungary,  most  of  Rumania,  northern  Bulgaria,  and  a  little 
corner  of  Russia  to  the  west  of  Odessa.  Further  to  the  eastward 
the  climate  becomes  too  dry  and  in  the  Volga  Basin  near  the  Cas- 
pian Sea  the  aridity  is  too  great  for  any  tilled  crops.  The  greater 
part  of  Russia  and  the  regions  to  the  north  of  the  Danube  Valley 
and  to  the  west  of  Hungary  are  too  cold  for  corn.  The  crop  of 
this  Danube  region  is  from  350  to  400  million  bushels  a  year, 
about  one-tenth  of  the  world's  supply,  and  about  equal  to  the 
crop  of  Illinois,  our  leading  corn  state.  Although  occupied  by 
several  different  nations,  the  lower  Danube  Valley  is,  like  our 
corn-belt,  one  economic  region.  Some  corn  is  also  grown  in  the 
more  hilly  part  of  the  Danube  drainage  basin  on  the  slopes  of 
the  Balkan  Mountains  in  Serbia  and  Bulgaria.  Austria-Hungary 
produces  about  as  much  corn  as  Indiana ;  Rumania  somewhat  less 
than  Oklahoma,  and  Russia  somewhat  less  than  South  Carolina. 
The  greater  number  of  the  people  in  this  corn  region  are  rather 
poor,  and  they  depend  for  breadstuff  almost  entirely  upon  corn, 
exporting  to  western  Europe  the  wheat  which  they  also  grow. 
They  also  export  some  corn  to  western  Europe,  Russia  sending 


THE  WORLD'S  CORN  REGIONS 


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126  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

forty  per  cent,  of  her  crop  and  Rumania  fifty  per  cent.,  before 
the  war. 

Corn  is  very  important  in  the  agriculture  of  this  region.  Of 
the  cultivated  land  in  Rumania,  one-third  is  in  wheat,  and  over 
one-third  (or  one-sixth  of  the  total  area)  is  in  corn,  as  compared 
with  a  little  over  one-fourth  of  the  total  area  of  Illinois  in  corn. 
In  the  Black  Sea  Basin  droughts  are  encountered  with  ever- 
increasing  frequency  as  one  goes  eastward.  The  inferiority  of 
the  region  as  a  corn  producer  is  shown  by  a  comparison  of  annual 
yield  in  bushels  per  acre  in  Rumania  and  Illinois  for  a  seven- 
year  period: 

1904      1905      1906       1907        1908        1909        1910 
Rumania  4          12          25          12.5          15          13.4          21.2 

Illinois  39.8       36.1       36          31.6          35.9       40  39.2 

The  certainty  of  reward  is  one  of  the  surest  spurs  to  labor, 
and  conversely,  uncertainty  of  reward  is  one  of  the  greatest 
deterrents  to  labor.  The  sure  relation  between  labor  and  harvest 
in  Illinois  and  the  great  uncertainty  in  Rumania,  as  shown  by 
the  fluctuating  corn  yield,  help  to  explain  why  one  region  is 
filled  with  progressive  and  aggressive  farmers  and  townsmen 
and  the  other  with  rather  backward  peasants  who  still  use  oxen 
for  work  animals.  Despite  these  handicaps  Rumania  managed 
to  send  to  the  foreign  markets  during  these  years  about  one- 
third  as  much  corn  as  the  United  States.  Water  transportation 
and  markets  are  more  accessible  to  the  Rumanian  corn-belt  than 
to  that  of  the  United  States. 

Hungary  (182  million  bushels,  1913)  grows  nearly  twice  as 
much  corn  as  Rumania  (118  million  bushels,  1913),  but  consumes 
nearly  all  of  it  within  her  own  boundaries.  The  people  have 
eaten  a  great  deal  of  it  during  the  Great  War. 

CORN   PRODUCTION   IN    MEDITERRANEAN    AND    ADJACENT   REGIONS 

Most  of  the  Mediterranean  basin  is  too  dry  in  summer  for 
the  growth  of  corn  except  under  irrigation.  France  has  a  little 
patch  of  corn  climate  wedged  in  between  the  cool  summer  of 
northwestern  Europe  and  the  dry  summer  of  the  Mediterranean. 
The  large  yield  of  corn  per  acre,  however,  makes  it  greatly 


OLD  WORLD  CORN  127 

desired  as  a  crop  by  peoples  poor  enough  to  use  it  as  their  chief 
food.  Italy  with  100  million  bushels  a  year  (about  equal  to 
Kentucky)  is  the  leader,  producing  twice  as  much  as  Spain  and 
the  south  of  France  combined.  Wherever  corn  can  be  irrigated  it 
is  grown  for  home  use,  largely  as  human  food,  in  Turkey,  Greece, 
and  Egypt,  where  it  is  an  important  crop;  but  the  dense  popu- 
lation consumes  all  of  the  100  million  bushels  of  corn  and  wheat 
produced  along  the  Nile,  and  in  addition  imports  some  of  both 
grains.  In  Egypt  the  corn  land  is  irrigated  every  ten  days  from 
July  to  October.  In  the  northwest  of  Portugal  and  Spain,  close 
to  the  sea,  there  is  enough  rainfall  for  a  poor  crop  without  irriga- 
tion, but  the  yield  is  low.  The  crop  of  Portugal  about  equals  that 
of  Maryland  and  Delaware.  Conditions  of  corn  growing  in 
Portugal  would  make  the  Illinois  farmer  laugh  with  derision, 
for  Portugal  unfortunately  is  a  country  where  most  educated 
men  think  that  work  would  hurt  their  social  position,  so  that 
agriculture  and  industry  are  left  in  the  hands  of  foreigners  and 
the  uneducated,  with  the  result  that  production  is  far  less  than 
it  might  be  under  scientific  management. 

The  desert  heart  of  the  Old  World  and  regions  adjacent  to  it, 
extending  from  southern  Morocco  across  northern  Africa,  Arabia, 
Persia,  and  the  deserts  of  central  Asia  and  Gobi  to  the  Great 
Wall  of  China,  can,  like  Egypt,  produce  corn  only  where  irriga- 
tion can  be  practised.  The  people  of  the  Barbary  States  grow 
some  corn,  as  do  those  of  Palestine  and  Asia  Minor.  It  is  grown 
to  some  extent  in  Persia,  and  it  is  relatively  important  in  Bo- 
khara and  other  oases  of  Russia,  central  Asia,  and  Turkestan.  In 
all  of  these  regions  it  is  so  highly  prized  as  human  food  that  no 
surplus  is  available  for  export  from  the  small  area  that  can  be 
irrigated.  The  only  possible  exception  to  this  condition  is  tin; 
at  present  unutilized  land  of  Mesopotamia,  once  the  seat  of  world 
empire,  now  almost  empty,  but  capable  today  of  larger  produc- 
tion than  ever  if  it  can  be  freed  from  one  of  the  greatest  curses 
of  mankind — the  misgovernment  with  which  the  Turk  has  long 
cursed  this  historic  land. 


128  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 


THE    CORN-BELT  OF   SOUTHEASTERN    ASIA 

The  sixth  corn  zone  is  to  be  found  in  the  moist  countries 
of  southeastern  Asia.  In  the  drier  parts  of  the  monsoon 
countries,  especially  China  and  India,  there  are  districts  as 
well  suited  to  corn  as  to  rice,  if  not  better,  for  rice  flourishes 
in  the  wet  summer,  whereas  corn  flourishes  in  the  moist  sum- 
mer, when  rain  is  interspersed  with  dry  days,  during  which 
the  ground  gets  dry  enough  to  be  plowed  without  becom- 
ing mud.  In  these  less  wet  parts  of  China  and  India,  the 
American  grain  is  extensively  grown,  though  not  for  export. 
The  amount  grown  in  these  countries  cannot  be  estimated;  but 
vast  quantities  are  eaten  by  the  700  million  inhabitants.  It  is 
extensively  grown  in  the  part  of  China  adjacent  to  Pckin  and  in 
southern  Manchuria.  Some  of  the  battles  of  the  Japanese- 
Eussian  War  were  fought  in  fields  of  standing  corn.  In  India 
the  chief  centers  of  corn  production  are  along  the  Ganges  River 
and  in  the  irrigated  lands  of  the  upper  Indus  Valley. 


THE   PARANA  VALLEY 

The  seventh  and  last  corn  zone  is  the  Parana  Valley  of  South 
America.  The  lower  part  of  this  valley  is  similar  to  the  lower 
Mississippi  Valley  in  latitude  and  climate.  To  understand  the 
character  of  this  South  American  region  we  should  turn  the 
map  of  it  upside  down  so  that  the  lands  along  the  Parana 
can  be  likened  to  the  swamps  and  forests  of  Louisiana,  form- 
ing a  region  from  which  the  moisture  gradually  decreases 
through  the  corn-belt  and  the  wheat-belt  to  a  grass-belt,  as  in 
the  regions  of  Louisiana,  Oklahoma,  Kansas,  and .  Texas.  In 
Paraguay,  near  the  edge  of  the  tropics  (comparable  to  the 
extreme  south  of  Louisiana  and  beyond),  a  rather  large  amount 
of  corn  is  grown  for  local  use.  Further  down  the  valley  in 
the  cooler  latitudes  are  several  provinces  of  Argentina  and 
a  small  area  in  Uruguay  where  corn  is  of  increasing  impor- 
tance. While  the  methods  are  said  to  be  exceedingly  careless, 
the  soil  is  very  fertile,  and  the  crop  is  receiving  more  and  more 
attention  from  the  large  number  of  Italian  farmers  who  have 


ARGENTINE  CORN  129 

settled  in  that  country.  Argentina  exports  at  the  present  time 
a  larger  proportion  of  its  corn  crop  than  any  other  country  of 
the  world,  because  the  people,  about  as  numerous  as  those  of 
Illinois  and  Iowa,  do  not  yet  use  it  largely  as  food,  and  for 
fattening  livestock  alfalfa  generally  suffices. 

Another  reason  why  so  little  corn  is  used  locally  is  the 
absence  of  the  hog  industry,  which  requires  rather  intelligent 
farming,  and  lands  fenced  off  for  the  care  of  the  animals.  These 
conditions  are  not  found  among  the  corn  growers,  usually  tran- 
sient tenants,  who  rent  the  lands  from  large  landowners,  pos- 
sessors of  Spanish  grants.  Often  they  do  not  have  a  shelter  under 
which  to  put  the  corn,  but  merely  cover  it  up  with  fodder  so  that 
sometimes  it  is  much  injured  by  the  heavy  rains  which  at  times 
make  the  roads  so  wet  and  muddy  that  for  weeks  at  a  time  the 
corn  cannot  be  taken  to  the  railroads  for  shipment  to  the  fleets 
of  tramp  steamers  that  lie  in  the  Parana  at  Rosario  and  Buenos 
Ayres. 

During  the  four-year  period  from  1907  to  1910  Argentina 
exported  seventy-seven  million  bushels  per  year  or  almost  exactly 
one-half  her  crop,  while  the  American  export  of  fifty-two  million 
per  year  was  a  little  over  one-fiftieth  of  the  total  crop.  The 
possibilities  for  the  relative  increase  of  corn  production  are 
probably  better  in  the  Parana  Valley  than  in  any  other  corn 
zone,  because  of  the  sparse  population  and  large  area,  of  which 
only  a  tenth  is  yet  in  cultivation.  The  present  production  is 
about  equal  to  that  of  the  Mediterranean  countries.  As  compared 
with  the  United  States  there  is,  however,  a  disadvantage  in  the 
less  regular  rainfall,  which  comes  a  little  later  in  the  sum- 
mer than  the  American.  This  will  be  a  permanent  hindrance  to 
great  production  because  of  the  uncertainties  of  the  harvest. 
Thus  the  fine  crop  of  1906,  195  million  bushels,  nearly  thirty 
bushels  to  the  acre,  led  to  enlarged  plantings  the  next  year ;  but 
the  crop  fell  to  seventy-two  million  and  the  yield  to  thirteen 
bushels  per  acre.  The  area  planted  in  1908  was  reduced  to  that 
of  1906.  In  1911  the  crop  throughout  the  country  was  a  failure, 
giving  but  3.4  bushels  per  acre.  In  1915  its  yield  exceeded  that 
of  the  United  States,  being  33.8  bushels,  with  a  crop  of 
338,000,000  bushels.  The  next  year  it  was  more  than  cut  in 
half,  with  161,000,000  bushels,  and  but  sixteen  bushels  to  the 


ISO  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

acre.  This  indicates  a  permanent  handicap.  Compare  the 
Illinois  yield  above  mentioned. 

Corn  is  grown  to  some  extent  in  a  few  scattered  places,  such 
as  northern  New  Zealand  and  the  eastern  margin  of  Australia; 
but  there  it  has  to  battle  against  droughts  and  scanty  rainfall  and 
because  of  these  obstacles  it  is  an  unimportant  crop.  The  same 
conditions  prevail  in  South  Africa.  The  grain  may  be  grown 
almost  anywhere  throughout  the  tropic  latitudes  and  is  grown 
in  many  scattered  places  in  Africa.  This  continent  may  some- 
time have  European  management  for  its  industries  and  become 
a  large  corn  grower.  It  is  probably  true,  however,  that  corn 
does  better  in  the  temperate  zone  with  its  chilly  nights  toward 
the  end  of  summer  than  it  does  in  the  unmitigated  heat  of  the 
tropic  lowland.  But  as  corn  must  have  hot  nights  for  a  part 
of  its  growth,  the  cool  nights  of  arid  climates  debar  it  from 
many  irrigated  districts  in  the  western  part  of  the  United  States. 
This  climate,  and  the  dry  summer  of  the  Pacific  Coast,  cause 
corn  to  be  of  almost  no  importance  west  of  the  Rocky  Mountains. 
Both  coolness  and  aridity  are  unfavorable  on  the  Great  Plains 
of  the  United  States  at  the  eastern  base  of  the  Rocky  Mountains. 

The  present  leadership  of  the  United  States  in  the  world's 
reported  corn  crop  is  well  shown  by  the  following : 

World  Crop  U.  S.  Crop      ^  G  ^ 

•„•      ,  .„.      .  *       U.  S.  Percentage 

million  bu.  million  bu. 

1911  3,481  2,531  72 

1912  4,369  3,124  70 

1913  3,605  2,446  68 

THE  FUTURE  OF  THE  CORN  SUPPLY 

Corn  holds  less  probability  of  increased  production  than 
wheat.  The  plant  is  too  exacting  in  its  climatic  needs  and 
cultural  methods.  It  cannot  stand  the  cool  climate  in  which 
wheat  thrives,  and  while  it  requires  much  more  moisture  than 
wheat,  it  cannot  stand  the  wet  climate  of  rice,  and  is  for  this 
reason  at  a  disadvantage  on  the  moist  Gulf  Coast  of  the  United 
States.  Here  continued  rain  often  prevents  cultivation  and  lets 
the  weeds  and  grass  get  a  dangerous  leadership. 

The  tractor  offers  less  possibility  of  revolution  in  corn  growing 


CORN  AND  THE  TRACTOR 


131 


than  in  wheat  growing.  Unlike  wheat  and  the  other  small  grains, 
corn  cannot  be  sown  broadcast,  but  each  plant  must  be  given  the 
monopoly  of  several  square  feet  of  soil  to  attain  its  gigantic  size 
and  make  its  great  ear  of  grain.  Therefore  it  must  be  cultivated ; 
and  for  this  work  the  tractor  offers  less  aid  at  the  present  time 


CORN 


TOTAL  PRODUCTION  &  PRODUCTION  PER  CAPITA 

BARS  *  DECENNIAL  CENSUS  DATA       CURVES  =  ANNUAL  ESTIMATES 


Fio.  47. — Compare  the  per  capita  with  the  total  output  and  one  sees 
a  reason  for  change  in  land  values  and  meat  prices,  and  therefore  of 
nearly  all  other  prices. 

to  corn  than  to  wheat,  which  requires  merely  to  be  sown  and  har- 
vested. While  the  tractor  can  prepare  the  ground  for  corn,  the 
limiting  factor  in  its  production  is  cultivation  after  planting;  and 
for  this  it  is  difficult  to  see  how  the  tractor  can  give  such  whole- 
Hale  aid  as  it  does  in  the  drawing  of  gangs  of  plows,  harrows, 
and  reapers.  It  is  also  unfortunate  that  no  generally  satis- 
factory labor-saving  machine  has  been  invented  for  the  harvest- 
ing of  corn.  As  a  result  most  of  the  corn  fodder  in  most  of 
the  corn-belt  of  the  United  States  is  wasted.  The  practice  i«  to 
let  the  frost  kill  the  corn  plant.  After  the  grain  is  thoroughly 


132  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

dry,  the  farmer  drives  through  the  field  with  a  wagon,  and  husks 
the  ears  as  he  goes  and  throws  them  into  the  wagon  bed.  Some- 
times the  ears  stay  out  thus  until  after  the  snow  melts  in  the 
spring.  Ordinarily  this  work  is  done  in  the  autumn  and  cattle 
are  turned  in  to  glean  some  of  the  fodder,  but  it  has  by  this 
time  lost  most  of  its  virtue  and  much  of  it  is  trampled  into  the 
ground  by  the  wasteful  beasts. 

Furthermore,  the  cultivation  of  corn,  leaving  the  ground  bare, 
favors  erosion.  It  is,  therefore,  not  so  well  adapted  to  hills  as 
are  the  small  grains — another  limitation  of  the  corn  area. 

For  these  reasons  the  possible  extension  of  corn  land  seems 
meager  in  comparison  with  that  of  wheat,  which  has  two  great 
northern  zones  of  expansion,  across  Eurasia,  and  another  from 
Lake  Superior  to  the  Eocky  Mountains;  three  great  dry  zones, 
one  from  the  Caspian  Sea  to  Lake  Baikal,  another  from  Alberta 
to  Texas,  and  a  third  throughout  the  whole  length  of  the 
Argentine.  The  European  corn  lands  are  already  on  the  margin. 
The  Asiatic  corn  lands  are  already  on  the  margin.  On  neither 
continent  is  there  much  possibility  of  increase.  The  American 
corn-belt  may  extend  somewhat  farther  north  into  the  lands  of 
cool  climate,  and  westward  into  the  lands  of  drought.  The 
Argentine  belt  also  may  be  enlarged  westward  into  the  lands 
of  drought,  and  there  may  be  two  belts  along  the  outer  edges  of 
the  African  tropics,  but  these  are  quite  problematical.  Better 
culture  seems  to  offer  better  promise  of  increased  production 
than  does  the  extension  of  areas. 

MILLET  AND  SORGHUM — CORN  SUBSTITUTES 

While  the  possibilities  of  extending  the  corn  lands  are  plainly 
less  promising  than  the  possibilities  of  increasing  wheat  lands,  we 
have  by  no  means  reached  or  approached  the  maximum  corn 
production,  especially  since  corn,  whose  chief  service  is  to  feed 
the  farm  animals,  achieves  this  end  by  two  means :  one  the  pro- 
duction of  corn,  the  other  the  production  of  stalk  for  coarse 
forage. 

Indian  corn,  which  our  predecessors  on  this  continent  culti- 
vated, is  not  the  only  plant  of  this  general  character  which  ren- 
ders these  services.  In  the  dry  country  of  South  Africa  we  have 
recently  found  what  we  call  Kafir  corn,  a  variety  of  sorghum, 


DRY  LAND  CORN 


138 


a  plant  much  resembling  the  broom  corn,  from  which  brooms 
are  made.  Kafir  corn  bears  little  round  seeds  on  the  ends  of 
short  broom-like  straws  in  the  form  of  a  bunch  or  brush.  From 
China  we  have  recently  introduced  other  varieties  of  sorghum, 
with  the  same  fruiting  habit,  and  from  India  and  many  other 


Fio.  48. — Compare   this  map    with    the   rice   map   of    India   and    see   the 
difference  between  wet-land  and  dry-land  crops.     (Finch  and  Baker.) 

parts  of  the  world  comes  yet  another  class  of  plants  much 
like  these,  called  millet.  Both  of  these  groups  of  plants  have 
grown  for  a  long  time  on  the  edge  of  Old  World  deserts.  They 
have  become  adjused  to  the  dry  environment,  especially  the 
sorghum,  which  the  Chinese  farmers  have  for  centuries  been 
growing  under  dry  conditions  until  by  the  process  of  natural  and 
artificial  selection  some  varieties  have  developed  a  marvelous 
power  of  pumping  water  out  of  the  earth.  So  desperately  do 
they  fight  for  water,  that  in  lands  of  little  rain  a  crop  failure 


134  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

can  be  counted  on  for  the  year  after  the  sorghum  has  grown,  so 
thoroughly  has  it  exhausted  the  subsoil  water.  This  valuable 
ability  really  means  that  the  sorghum  can  make  one  crop  out  of 
the  scanty  rainfall  of  two  years,  which  is  quite  insufficient  for 
the  common  kinds  of  corn. 

Sorghums  and  millets  produce  small  round  seeds.  Some 
varieties  have  been  specialized  to  produce  grain  to  serve  as  food 
for  men  and  beasts.  Others  have  been  specialized  to  produce 
stalk  as  food  for  the  beasts  only.  Many  varieties  of  these  corn 
substitutes  have  been  grown  for  centuries,  indeed  for  ages.  Their 
recent  introduction  into  the  United  States  has  shown  that  they 
are  distinctly  superior  to  common  corn  on  the  western  edge  of 
the  corn-belt,  and  beyond  question  they  are  extending  the  corn- 
belt  farther  into  the  dry  lands  of  Texas,  Oklahoma,  Kansas,  and 
Nebraska. 

By  selection  the  Chinese  sorghums  have  been  much  improved 
within  a  few  years.  They  have  established  their  distinct  superi- 
ority over  Indian  corn,  and  have  replaced  corn  in  many  counties 
of  this  southwestern  region.  The  1,250,000  acres  of  this  crop  in 
the  United  States  in  1910  had  increased  to  4,000,000  acres  in 
1916,  an  area  greater  than  that  of  the  potato  lands  of  the  United 
States.  We  can  better  appreciate  the  possibilities  of  these  plants 
if  we  understand  their  importance  throughout  the  world. 

Millet  is  probably  even  more  important  at  present  than 
sorghum.  It  is  a  plant  not  unlike  corn  or  sugar  cane  in  general 
appearance,  with  its  seed  in  a  head  somewhat  like  that  of  the 
cattail.  It  is  estimated  that  one-third  of  the  human  race  uses  the 
seed  as  food.  We  can  scarcely  say  more  of  wheat.  The  grain, 
which  is  smaller  than  the  wheat  grain,  is_boiled  and  used  like  rice, 
or  eaten  parched,  or  made  into  meal  and  porridge.  There  are 
many  varieties,  some  a  dozen  feet  in  height.  Some  are  grown  for 
forage  only,  some  for  human  food,  some  for  both  purposes ;  some 
varieties  furnish  fuel  in  their  woody  stalks.  In  parts  of  northern 
China  it  is  almost  the  only  fuel  used  by  the  peasant  farmer,  who 
has  a  low  brick  platform  around  one  side  of  the  room,  with  a  slow 
fire  beneath  it  made  of  millet  stalks.  By  this  means  a  very  small 
amount  of  fuel  keeps  the  brickwork  warm,  and  on  it  the  family 
sits  and  sleeps. 

Millet  is  grown  to  some  extent  in  most  parts  of  the  temperate 


MILLET  WORLD-WIDE 


135 


zone  and  also  in  the  tropics.  It  is  grown  occasionally  in  nearly 
all  parts  of  the  United  States  for  forage  only,  but  the  excellence 
of  corn  in  the  East  and  South  keeps  it  from  having  any  wide  use 
in  this  part  of  the  country.  Its  cultivation  for  forage  on  the 
western  edge  of  the  American  corn-belt  is,  however,  very  rapidly 
increasing.  In  Europe,  also,  in  the  Mediterranean  region  and 
Russia,  it  is  extensively  grown  for  forage.  It  is  used  as  food 


HOP*   AND   IWIR  COHN  AND  MIL.O   MAIZE 


EACH    DOT    KCMCSCNT* 


FIG.  49. — Compare  this  area  with  the  location  of  the  corn  area  on 
the  corn  map,  and  also  compare  it  with  the  drought  map,  Fig.  14. 
(Finch  and  Baker.) 

to  a  slight  extent  in  Europe  and  among  the  natives  of  Mexico 
and  Africa,  but  it  is  in  Asia  that  millet  reaches  its  greatest 
importance.  Japan  is  credited  with  an  annual  consumption  of 
thirty-five  million  bushels.  India  annually  cultivates  forty 
million  acres,  while  her  wheat  crop  covers  but  twenty  to  thirty 
million  acres  and  that  of  the  United  States  but  fifty  million 
(1913,  only  46  million  1917).  In  China  also  millet  is  widely 
used  as  food,  and  there  are  records  showing  that  it  has  been  so 
used  for  about  5,000  years.  The  accounts  of  the  Russo-Japanese 
War  show  that  some  of  the  campaigns  were  waged  in  Manchu- 
rian  fields  of  millet,  as  well  as  of  Indian  corn.  E.  R.  Scidmore  * 


*  National  Geographic  Magazine,  April,  1010. 


136  CORN  AND  ITS  SUBSTITUTES 

says  that  a  giant  millet  ten  or  twelve  feet  high,  along  with  a 
short  millet  and  sorghum,  is  extensively  grown  in  Manchuria. 
The  giant  millet  looks  like  the  corn  shocks  of  Indiana  and  "is 
used  for  food,  fuel,  distilled  drink,  mats  for  the  floor,  and  for 
building  material,  and  has  thousands  of  uses  and  the  yield  is  a 
thousandfold."  Millet  seems  to  have  been  very  important  to  the 
prehistoric  lake  dwellers  of  Switzerland. 


UNITED  STATES 

MILLET 

ACREAGE 

CACM  DOT  REPRESENTS  IOOO  ACHES 


FIG.  50. —  (Finch  and  Baker.) 

The  sorghum  family,  until  recently  little  known  in  the  United 
States,  is  also  important  in  many  parts  of  the  world.  To  this 
family  belong  the  sugar-producing  sorghum  (see  chapter  on 
Sugar) ,  and  many  other  varieties  entirely  unknown  in  this  coun- 
try. They  are  tall  plants  resembling  millet  in  appearance,  except 
for  the  different  form  of  seed-bearing  head.  They  are  substi- 
tutes for  both  millet  and  corn.  In  China,  India,  and  Africa  their 
use  as  forage  and  as  human  food  is  very  common,  while  some  of 
the  many  varieties  are  cultivated  for  human  food  in  nearly  all 
the  warmer  countries  of  the  world.  One  member  of  this  family  is 
dhurra,  the  oft-mentioned  food  grain  of  many  African  tribes. 
For  example,  it  is  said  to  be  the  staple  food  of  the. native  popu- 
lation in  the  valley  of  the  Blue  Nile,  a  typical  piece  of  transition 
land  between  the  Sahara  desert  and  the  African  forest. 


A  NEW  FOOD  AGE-OLD  137 

In  these  millets  and  sorghums  lies  the  great  hope  of  extending 
the  corn-belt  into  arid  lands.  A  recent  report  on  the  agricul- 
ture of  the  Imperial  Valley,  that  interesting  American  counter- 
part of  the  Nile  Delta,  shows  that  in  June,  1918,  of  over  488,000 
acres  under  cultivation,  150,000  were  in  milo  maize  (an  im- 
ported sorghum),  110,000  in  alfalfa,  75,000  acres  in  cotton. 
Already  the  experience  of  the  American  West  is  being  copied  in 
Argentina,  where  the  Central  Argentine  Railroad  Company  is 
making  an  effort  to  duplicate  the  experience  of  Oklahoma  and 
western  Kansas  by  persuading  the  farmers  of  the  provinces  of 
Santiago  del  Estero  and  northwestern  Santa  Fe  to  grow  kafir 
corn  and  milo  maize  instead  of  Indian  corn,  which  in  this  terri- 
tory suffers  from  frequent  drought.  These  grains  may  perhaps 
also  attain  great  importance  in  Africa,  the  land  of  their  nativity: 
for  there  is  a  very  long  belt  where  these  grains  are  today  grown 
in  small  quantities  throughout  north  Africa  at  its  widest  from 
the  Arabian  Sea  to  the  North  Atlantic,  and  across  south  Africa 
near  the  tropic  of  Capricorn.  Under  conditions  of  order  and  the 
opportunity  to  trade,  these  lands  may,  like  Java,  become  popu- 
lous with  grain  growers,  who  will  raise  sorghum  and  millet  for 
export.  It  is  conceivable  that  this  region  might  in  time  yield 
more  than  the  American  corn-belt. 

As  these  grains  have  fed  countless  millions  for  countless  cen- 
turies in  both  Africa  and  Asia,  they  may  also  if  needed  become 
food  for  the  American  and  European  as  well  as  for  his  beast. 
Experiments  in  this  direction  by  the  United  States  Department 
of  Agriculture  are  reported  as  follows: 

To  many  palates  the  grain  sorghums  more  nearly  resemble  buck- 
wheat in  flavor  than  they  do  corn  or  wheat.  The  flavor  is  quite  generally 
regarded  as  agreeable,  and  the  grains  are  conceded  to  be  wholesome. 
Though  their  protein  is  less  completely  assimilated  than  that  of  corn  or 
wheat,  they  are  nevertheless,  with  the  exception  of  kaoliang  (one  of 
the  Chinese  sorghums)  a  fairly  good  source  of  this  nutrient.  Further- 
more, the  sorghums  are  a  good  source  of  carbohydrate  and  furnish 
this  important  food  constituent  in  a  form  very  completely  available  to 
the  body.  The  use  of  the  grain  sorghums  in  general  offers  variety  to 
the  diet,  and  in  regions  where  other  cereals  are  not  so  successfully 
grown  they  may  contribute  materially  to  the  supply  of  materials 
suitable  as  human  food.* 

*  Bulletin  470,  p.  30. 


CHAPTER  VI 
POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

IF  at  any  time  any  one  fears  the  early  approach  of  serious  food 
shortage,  let  him  consider  the  potato  and  take  comfort.  This 
article  of  food  is  second  only  to  wheat  in  the  number  of  times 
per  year  that  it  is  eaten  in  America,  and  in  Europe  it  probably 
stands  first.  Analysis  shows  that  it  is  very  close  to  wheat  in 
actual  food  value;  but  it  contains  so  much  water  that  we  have 
to  eat  four  times  as  much  potato  as  wheat  in  order  to  obtain  the 
same  amount  of  nourishment. 

So  far  as  land  resources  arc  concerned,  Europe  may  raise 
many  more  potatoes  than  it  now  grows,  and  North  America  can 
easily  multiply  its  potato  area  thirty-fold  and  then  double  the 
average  yield  per  acre.  Furthermore,  this  increase  can  be  made 
without  reducing  the  amount  of  grain  crops,  milk,  or  meat 
produced. 

The  potato  has  revolutionized  Europe ;  it  raised  Germany  from 
a  third-rate  power  to  a  world  menace,  and  if  need  be  it  may 
revolutionize  the  economic  status  of  a  great  section  of  central 
North  America  from  central  Ohio  to  the  forests  of  the  Ontario 
highlands,  and  from  Newfoundland  to  Michigan,  Manitoba, 
Alberta,  and  Alaska.  Indeed,  so  nourishing  is  this  food  of  which 
North  America  may  multiply  its  crop  sixty-fold,  that  Professor 
Graham  Lusk,  of  the  Cornell  University  Medical  School,  reports 
a  case  of  the  entirely  satisfactory  support  of  a  human  being  on 
nothing  but  potatoes  and  vegetable  fat.* 

The  potato,  which  is  chiefly  a  starch  food,  shows  the  ingenuity 
with  which  plants  store  away  their  wealth  much  after  the  fashion 

* "  A  remarkable  experiment  on  the  effect  of  a  potato  dic-t  has  heen 
reported  by  Ilindhede.  An  individual  partook  of  a  diet  of  between  four 
and  one-half  and  nine  pounds  of  potatoes  daily,  with  some  vegetable 
margarine,  during  a  period  of  nearly  three  hundred  days.  The  rule  was 
to  eat  only  when  hungry  and  then  the  potatoes  could  lie  taken  at  the  rate 
of  an  ounce  a  minute.  During  the  last  three  months  (ninety-five  days) 

138 


ORIGIN  OF  NEW  VARIETIES  139 

of  men,  who  lay  up  treasures  in  banks  or  storehouses.  Starch 
is  really  the  surplus  nutrition  which  the  plants  store  within  them- 
selves for  future  needs  or  for  their  offspring.  Sometimes  it  is 
packed  in  the  seeds,  as  in  the  grains ;  or  in  the  roots,  as  in  sweet 
potatoes;  or  in  the  tuber,  a  peculiar  underground  stem,  as  in 
the  white  potatoes;  or  even  in  the  trunk  of  the  tree,  as  in  the 
sago  palm.  At  some  later  time  of  need  it  makes  the  plant  grow, 
or,  if  we  eat  it,  it  helps  to  make  fat  and  heat  to  keep  the  body 
warm  and  gives  energy  for  work. 

The  potato  is  a  native  of  the  elevated  valleys  of  Chile,  Peru, 
and  Mexico.  It  was  brought  to  Europe  by  Sir  Walter  Raleigh 
in  1586,  but  did  not  come  into  general  use  on  the  continent  until 
the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century.  For  two  centuries  it  was 
grown  in  many  localities  for  fodder,  the  people  objecting  to  eat- 
ing it  and  only  adopting  it  when  grain  crops  failed.  It  should 
be  said  in  defense  of  these  conservatives  that  potatoes  were  not  so 
good  then  as  they  are  now,  since  they  have  been  greatly  improved 
by  deliberate  breeding.  We  owe  much  to  the  Rev.  Chauncey  E. 
Goodrich,  of  Utica,  New  York,  who  greatly  improved  potatoes 
and  created  several  new  varieties. 

The  creation  of  new  varieties  is  very  simple.  The  ordinary 
method  of  crop  growing  is  to  cut  up  a  tuber  and  plant  the 
pieces,  which  sprout  and  establish  themselves  with  the  starch 
they  contain.  Thus  the  potatoes  produced  are  in  a  sense  a  con- 
tinuance of  the  parent  potatoes,  and  are  of  the  same  variety, 
whereas  the  seeds,  being  hybrids  with  other  plants,  differ  so  that 
all  one  needs  to  do  to  establish  a  new  variety  is  to  plant  seeds 
and  raise  plants,  each  one  of  which  is  a  new  variety.  One  out 
of  a  few  hundreds  or  thousands  will  be  worthy  of  reproduction. 

Since  the  potato  yields  twenty  to  thirty  times  the  weight  of 
wheat,  barley,  or  oats,  its  importance  as  food  supply  in  densely 
peopled  regions  is  at  once  apparent.  Next  to  corn  it  is  the 
greatest  food  plant  we  have,  and  outside  the  corn-belt  it  is  with- 
out a  rival  in  North  America,  Europe,  or  Asia.  Its  use  was  so 

of  the  experiment  severe  mechanical  work  was  performed  and  the  total 
food  intake  for  the  latter  period  amounted  to  770  pounds  of  potatoes  and 
48  pounds  of  margarine.  What  could  be  mon-  simple  than  stocking  the 
cellar  with  coal,  potatoes,  and  a  tub  of  margarine!  Who  then  would 
worry  about  the  complexities  of  modern  life?" — Food  in  War  Time, 
Professor  Graham  Lusk,  pp.  15-16. 


140   POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

extensive  in  Ireland  in  the  middle  of  the  last  century  that  upon 
the  outbreak  of  blight  in  1846,  the  almost  total  destruction  of 
the  crop  resulted  in  a  famine  from  which,  together  with  the 
accompanying  pestilence,  600,000  people  perished  within  a  year. 
This  blight  soon  spread  to  America,  and  continues  there,  greatly 
interfering  with  potato  production.  While  the  blight  can  be 
partially  controlled  by  systematic  spraying,  it  is  true  that  the 
potato  was  more  important  in  America  before  1840  than  it  has 
ever  been  since.  It  was  one  of  the  means  by  which  New  Eng- 
land, rocky,  cold,  and  none  too  fertile,  was  able  to  support  so 
many  more  farming  people  in  1818  than  in  1918. 

The  potato  is  very  widely  distributed  throughout  the  United 
States  as  well  as  other  parts  of  the  north  temperate  zone.  A 
recent  census  showed  that  it  grows  in  every  county  in  the 
United  States,  save  one  at  the  tip  of  Florida,  two  above  the 
limit  of  profitable  agriculture  in  Colorado,  and  several  in  the 
driest  parts  of  Texas  where  irrigation  has  not  been  established. 
In  Europe  it  is  but  little  less  common. 

There  are  several  reasons  for  this  wide  distribution : 

1.  It  is  a  hardy,  short-season  crop,  maturing  farther  north 
and    at   higher    altitudes   than    any    other    food    crop     except 
barley. 

2.  While  hot  weather  at  the  time  the  plant  is  making  the 
tubers  interferes  with  a  large  crop,  the  short  season  that  it 
requires  for  growth  enables  the  plant  to  make  a  good  crop  in 
the  South  during  the  late  winter  and  early  spring  months,  so 
that  Florida,  the  Canary  Islands,  and  Algeria  can  send  new 
potatoes  in  January  as  a  luxury  to  the  cities  of  the  then  frozen 
North. 

3.  Because  of  many  varieties  and  times  of  planting,  the  potato 
may  be  grown  with  fair  success  on  a  great  variety  of  soils,  pro- 
vided they  are  well  drained  and  sufficiently  moist. 

4.  Being  mostly  water,  the  potato  is  difficult  to  transport  be- 
cause of  the  large  bulk  and  the  resultant  low  price  per  unit. 
Transport  is  made  yet  harder  because  heat  and  frost  alike  injure 
this  watery  but  useful  tuber.     Potatoes  cannot  be  kept  from 
season  to  season  as  can  many  foods.     Consequently  we  do  not 
have  a  world  market  for  potatoes  as  we  have  for  wheat  or  even 
meat,  butter,  or  beans.    Because  of  this  difficulty  in  transporta- 


WIDE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CROP  141 

tion,  each  locality  is  likely  to  grow  at  least  a  part  of  its  own 
potatoes. 

5.  Its  wide-spread  use  as  food  naturally  leads  people  to  try  to 
grow  it  wherever  they  can.    It  is  so  common  in  the  farm  and 
village  gardens  almost  everywhere,  even  where  it  is  not  a  com- 
mercial crop,  that  merchants  in  many  country  towns  in  the 
United  States  do  not  keep  potatoes  for  sale  because  each  family 
raises  its  own  supply. 

6.  It  is  a  valuable  crop  to  grow :  for  the  great  yield  offsets  its 
low  food  value  per  pound. 

For  some  or  all  of  these  reasons  its  growth  is  common  in  all 
Caucasian  lands.  It  appears  occasionally  e/en  in  Africa,  but 
was  not  introduced  into  conservative  China  until  about  1875. 
In  the  rice-growing  parts  of  this  empire  the  potato  is  held  in 
contempt,  but  in  the  mountainous  and  northern  parts  it  is  dili- 
gently grown.  The  potato  has  certainly  established  itself  as  the 
great  cool  climate  starch  food,  but  its  growth  as  a  money  crop 
is  quite  restricted,  offering  in  this  respect  a  marked  contrast  to 
wheat.  The  potato  and  rice  are  rivals  in  supplying  starch  to 
the  tables  of  Europe  and  America,  but  rarely  does  a  farmer 
raise  both  rice  and  potatoes.  The  recently  discovered  art 
of  making  potato  flour  has  given  the  otherwise  perishable  tuber 
a  new  means  of  competing  with  rice ;  but  thus  far  the  flour  has 
not  met  with  very  wide  use  outside  of  Germany,  where  it  was 
first  manufactured.  One  of  the  results  of  the  Great  War  will 
probably  be  the  establishment  of  the  dried  potato  as  a  perma- 
nent part  of  the  world 's  dietary,  to  the  great  increase  of  the  food 
supply. 

Almost  the  only  soil  in  which  the  potato  does  not  do  well  is 
heavy  clay,  but  it  grows  very  well  on  sandy  loams  and  even 
sandy  soils,  which  tend  to  make  the  potato  mealy.  As  it  also 
prefers  cool  weather  and  endures  moisture  as  well  as  sand,  it 
does  well  in  regions  that  produce  rye.  It  thus  attains  its  great- 
est importance  on  the  cool  sandy  plains  of  north-central  Europe 
from  the  English  Channel  to  the  Ural  Mountains  through  north- 
ern France,  Belgium,  Holland,  Germany,  Poland,  and  Russia. 
(See  table,  The  Food  of  Nations,  p.  175.)  In  these  countries  the 
potato  corresponds  to  corn  in  the  American  corn-belt  or  rice  in 
the  Orient.  Despite  the  fact  that  the  potato  originally  came 


142      POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

from  America,  nine-tenths  of  the  crop  is  grown  in  Europe,  be- 
cause there  are  the  people  who  are  willing  to  eat  it.  This  does 
not  mean  that  nine-tenths  of  the  eaters  are  in  Europe,  for  the 
European  population  is  approximately  four  times  that  of  Anglo- 
Saxon  North  America;  but  the  people  in  America  have  corn, 
wheat,  and  other  cereals,  which,  because  of  their  greater  wealth, 
they  eat  instead  of  the  more  humble  potato  which  becomes  in 
America  a  supplementary  article  of  diet.  In  Europe  it  is  a 
-staple. 


The  regions  that  best  meet  the  conditions  for  potato  growing 
are  the  northern  and  northeastern  portions  of  the  United  States, 
Canada,  northern  Europe,  Alaska,  and  Siberia.  Most  of  the 
southern  hemisphere  is  too  dry  to  make  good  potato  land.  The 
climate  is  also  milder  than  the  same  latitudes  in  the  north,  so 
that  most  of  this  part  of  the  world  is  too  warm  for  the  potato. 
Hence,  as  the  population  in  these  regions  is  very  scanty,  the 
potato  is  relatively  unimportant,  except  in  New  Zealand,  where 
it  thrives.  There  is  a  small  area  of  potato  climate  at  the  tip  of 
South  America,  but  it  is  a  land  of  rocky  forests  or  sheep  ranches. 

North  of  the  Alps  the  potato  reaches  its  greatest  importance, 
as  the  region  combines  coolness  with  much  sandy  soil  and  a  large 
population.  South  of  the  Alps  the  dry  summer  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean climate  checks  its  cultivation.  Thus  Sweden,  with  five 
and  one-half  million  people,  grows  as  many  potatoes  as  Italy, 
with  thirty-five  million  people.  In  southeastern  Europe,  as  in 
the  American  corn-belt,  the  potato  offers  little  competition  with 
corn.  Hungary  with  its  hot  summer  is  a  great  corn  grower, 
while  Austria,  with  its  summer  too  cool  for  corn,  is  a  great  potato 
grower,  producing  from  thirty  to  seventy  per  cent,  more  potatoes 
than  the  United  States. 

A  table  of  the  world's  food  just  before  the  war  gives  many 
interesting  statistics  concerning  man's  relation  to  the  earth 
which  supports  him — among  them  the  great  per  capita  growth  of 
potatoes,  barley,  and  rye  in  northern  Europe  where  corn  is  not 
grown ;  and  the  small  growth  of  these  three  northern  crops  in 
southeastern  Europe,  southern  Europe,  and  the  United  States, 


THE  YIELD  PER  ACRE  US 

where  much  corn  is  raised.  The  figures  for  Austria  (including 
Bohemia,  largely  in  the  Baltic  Basin)  and  Hungary  (in  the 
Black  Sea  Basin)  illustrate  the  contrast  between  northern  and 
southern  crops.  The  figures  of  United  States  potato  production 
show  these  same  differences  quite  as  sharply  for  the  various 
regions  of  this  country.  For  the  three  years,  1915  to  1917, 
Maine  averaged  172  bushels  of  potatoes  per  acre,  Maryland  97, 
and  Florida  81.  The  total  production  of  the  three  states  was 
respectively  22,000,000,  4,000,000,  and  1,500,000  bushels.  Per 
capita  Maine  had  29.6,  Maryland  3.1,  and  Florida  2.  bushels. 

As  the  bulky  tuber  yields  on  the  average  five  to  ten  times  as 
many  bushels  per  acre  as  does  wheat,  and  provides  much  more 
food  value,  it  is  of  great  value  in  enabling  land  to  support  dense 
populations.  A  ten-year  average  yield  per  acre  in  the  United 
States  is:  wheat,  14.3  bushels;  corn,  26  bushels;  potatoes,  92 
bushels.  But  the  German  yield  is  190  bushels  of  potatoes,  the 
Belgian  yield  in  1912-13  was  305  bushels,  the  Dutch  yield  was 
295  bushels,  and  the  Danish  yield  was  21G  bushels.*  Owing  to 
the  laborious  method  of  preparing  the  expensive  seed,  the  fer- 
tilizers necessary,  the  need  of  continuous  cultivation  and  of 
protection  from  insects  and  fungi  by  spraying,  and  the  pick- 
ing up  of  the  thousands  and  thousands  of  tubers  per  acre,  the 
potato  crop  requires  more  labor  than  a  crop  of  any  of  the 
grains.  Hence  potato  fields  are  smaller  than  grain  fields,  and 
the  crop  is  well  fitted  to  serve  where  a  small  area  must,  by 
much  labor,  be  made  to  yield  a  large  product.  The  potato 
harvest,  towards  the  end  of  summer,  leaves  the  ground  in 
excellent  condition  for  the  fine  crop  of  winter  grain  which  usu- 
ally follows  it.  The  potato  may  therefore  usually  be  added  to 
the  agriculture  of  any  district  without  in  any  way  reducing 
the  total  production  of  the  other  crops.  It  may  reduce  the 
total  average  amount  of  food  produced  per  man,  but  not  per 
acre.  The  potato  also  responds  well  to  intensive  cultivation,  as 
is  shown  by  the  higher  average  yield  in  Europe  than  in  America. 

The  potato  is  important  to  the  French  (population  40  mil- 
lion) ;  their  crop  of  over  500  million  bushels  (1912-13)  is  far 

*  In  1916,  seven  American  potato-club  hoys,  working  under  guidance, 
produced  an  average  of  over  400  bushelB  per  acre,  and  one  boy  produced 
612  bushels  per  acre. 


144      POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

ahead  of  that  of  the  United  States  (100  million  people,  390  mil- 
lion bushels  potatoes).  The  uncertainty  of  yield  is  well  illus- 
trated by  the  French  crop  of  1910,  which  was  313  million 
bushels,  less  than  that  of  the  United  States.  The  Dutch  and  the 
Belgians  make  their  small  countries  produce  a  surprising  amount 
of  potatoes.  The  production  in  Belgium  per  square  mile  is  about 
sixty  times  that  of  the  United  States ;  the  population  per  square 


FIG.  51. — The  calcareous  wheat  and  beet  lands  of  northeastern  France 
interrupt  a  potato-belt  of  great  extent.  The  potato  does  not  relish  lime. 
(Finch  and  Baker.) 


mile  is  about  twenty  times  as  dense.  North  Germany  with  her 
cool  sandy  plains  finds  the  potato  one  of  the  best  crops  she  can 
grow;  accordingly  Germany  is  the  greatest  potato-producing 
country  in  the  world,  having  14  per  cent,  of  her  crop  land  in  this 
crop,  while  the  United  States  has  but  1.2  per  cent.  Along  with 
Holland,  Belgium,  and  the  north  of  France,  Germany  normally 
exported  some  potatoes  to  England,  where,  because  of  the  gen- 
eral neglect  of  agriculture,  the  home  supply  has  for  some  time 
been  insufficient  under  peace  conditions. 

Russia  and  the  three  Scandinavian  countries  with  their  cold 
climate  and  areas  of  sandy  soils  are  relatively  heavy  growers  and 


AMERICAN  NEGLECT  OF  POTATO 


145 


111 


II  111 

iiiiiii. 


consumers  of  the  potato,  Russia  with  her  vast 
numbers  to  feed  being  second  only  to  Germany. 
Even  Switzerland  grows  nearly  forty  million 
bushels  a  year  and  usually  supplies  her  own 
needs,  despite  the  fact  that  her  16,000  square 
miles  of  area  include  the  stupendous  Alps 
and  that  she  has  3,600,000  people  to  feed — ' 
another  evidence  of  the  value  of  the  potato  in 
intensive  agriculture.  Switzerland  even  suffers 
at  times  from  overproduction  of  potatoes. 

In  Germany  about  sixty  million  bushels  a 
year  of  a  particularly  large  flavorless  potato 
unsuitable  for  food  but  of  abundant  yield  are 
grown  for  the  sole  purpose  of  being  distilled 
into  alcohol  for  fuel  or  drinking  purposes. 
Thus  Germany  makes  use  of  her  chemical  skill 
to  eke  out  her  insufficient  supply  of  petroleum. 
The  same  practice  also  prevails,  to  a  lesser 
extent,  in  Holland  and  Belgium.  Germany's 
total  crop  before  the  war  was  24  bushels  per 
capita;  after  making  allowance  for  distillation 
and  export,  she  had  20  bushels  of  potatoes  per 
capita  per  year  (1911-13)  ;  Belgium  had  15.2; 
Sweden,  12.2 ;  Austria,  15.4 — in  comparison  with 
less  than  4  in  the  United  States  and  1.8  in  Italy 
and  2.3  in  Chile  (a  South  American  country 
with  [in  part]  the  Mediterranean  climate  of  hot 
dry  summer,  to  which  the  potato  is  ill  suited). 
The  abundance  of  potatoes  in  a  country  with 
favorable  climate  may,  to  some  extent,  be  taken 
as  a  sign  of  scarcity  of  land,  with  its  resultant 
intensive  agriculture.  And  conversely,  the  fact 
that  North  America  might  increase  her  potato 
crop  sixty-fold  is  a  sign  of  our  present  per 
capita  wealth.  A  few  years  ago  some  people 
were  inclined  to  laugh  at  Professor  Simon  N. 
Patten,  when  he  said  that  the  potato  had  made 
a  great  power  of  Germany  and  had  enabled 
her  to  overthrow  France,  who  had  been  her 


146      POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

superior  in  the  days  when  wheat  was  a  more  exclusive  basis 
of  man's  support  than  it  was  after  the  potato  had  become  general 
in  the  agriculture  of  northern  Europe.  Every  one  now  agrees 
with  Dr.  Patten,  for  it  has  been  shown  that  the  German  nation 
has  been  sustained  during  the  Great  War  by  the  potato,  just  as 
the  United  States  has  been  supported  by  corn.  But  the  German 
potato  has  been  of  greater  service  than  the  American  corn. 
Germans  were  eating  7.3  bushels  per  capita  before  the  war,  they 
were  feeding  40  per  cent,  of  the  crop  to  farm  stock,  chiefly  swine ; 
they  were  using  one-tenth  for  alcohol  and  potato  flour.  During 
the  war  the  cutting  off  of  the  foreign  trade  has  pushed  the 
potato  into  greater  prominence  in  the  German  dietary,  so  that 
it  is  well  within  the  facts  to  say  that  the  failure  of  the  potato 
crop  in  any  season  would  have  brought  the  nation  to  her 
knees. 

Before  the  war  it  is  estimated  that  the  Germans  were  drying 
800,000,000  bushels  a  year  for  swine  food  and  human  food.  In 
1917  it  was  reported  that  there  were  1,350  factories  for  drying 
potatoes,  and  it  is  believed  that  great  stocks  of  dried  potatoes 
were  stored  away  in  Germany  before  the  war  as  a  preparation 
for  it.  The  drying  of  the  potato  is  an  easy  and  successful  process, 
and  it  is  an  example  of  our  economic  profligacy  that  we  have  not 
made  more  use  of  it. 

J.  Lawrence  Laughlin,  in  his  book  Credit  in  War  Time,  shows 
its  importance  by  saying  that  in  France  the  potato  equals  wheat 
and  rye  as  a  food  for  the  people,  and  wheat  and  rye  are  about 
equal  to  each  other.  In  Germany  the  potato  is  three  to  four 
times  as  important  as  wheat  and  rye,  while  in  the  United  States 
it  is  but  one-half  as  important  as  wheat  and  rye. 

Experimental  dryings  of  potatoes  have  been  made  in  the 
United  States. 

Some  of  the  best  hotels  in  the  country  have  tried  the  dried  sliced 
potatoes,  some  of  the  best  restaurants,  some  of  the  most  fastidious 
people,  some  of  the  best  cooks,  and  the  general  verdict  is  that  when 
properly  processed  and  properly  cooked  they  are  almost  indistinguish- 
able from  the  fresh  product,  either  as  mashed  potato  or  when  French- 
fried. 

After  most  careful  trials  the  army  has  learned  how  to  use  them 
successfully,  and  one  of  the  largest  navy  cooking  schools  has  reported 
most  favorably  on  them.  In  food  value,  in  appearance,  and  in  flavor 


DRYING  THE  POTATO  147 

they  are  the  equal  of  any  but  the  potato  fresh  from  the  hill.     But 
how  many  of  us  get  them  fresh  from  the  hill? 

Under  these  circumstances  and  in  the  face  of  hundreds  of  analyses 
and  dietetic  tests  which  have  been  made,  is  it  the  patriotic  thing  to 
wonder  and  hold  back  and  hesitate  as  to  whether  we  can  learn  to  use 
dried  potatoes?  * 

During  the  war  Holland  was  in  almost  the  same  food  situation 
as  Germany.  She  too  gave  the  dried  potato  a  position  of  promi- 
nence. It  has  been  reported  that  a  single  factory  made  33,000 
bushels  of  fresh  potatoes  into  flour  each  day.  At  the  beginning 
of  1918  the  Dutch  reported  30,000  tons  of  potato  flour  on  hand. 
Of  course  there  is  no  gluten  in  potato  flour  to  stick  it  together, 
but  the  food  value  is  there.  It  can  be  mixed  with  wheat  flour, 
used  as  soup,  and  eaten  in  other  ways.  There  are  two  substances 
called  potato  flour: 

One  is  the  natural  potato  flour,  which  is  made  by  washing  and 
slicing  and  cooking  and  then  drying  the  potatoes  and  later  grinding 
them  and  bolting  the  flour,  much  as  wheat  is  bolted.  This  process 
retains  all  of  the  mineral  salts. 

The  other  product  is  known  as  potato  starch  flour,  and  is  made  by 
first  grinding  the  potatoes,  pumping  the  pulp  on  a  screen,  which  takes 
out  the  coarse  fiber  and  skin,  and  then  by  dropping  this  pulp  into 
vats,  where,  by  means  of  running  water,  all  of  the  remaining  fiber 
and  much  of  the  protein  and  mineral  salts  are  washed  out,  leaving 
only  the  pure  starch. 

This  is  the  starch  which  prior  to  the  war  was  used  by  the  clothing 
manufacturers  for  the  sizing  of  their  fabrics.  Now,  when  wheat  flour 
is  scarce,  it  has  come  into  use  for  the  making  of  high-class  pastries. 
It  has  not,  of  course,  the  nutritive  value  of  the  natural  potato  flour.* 

THE   POTATO   IN   THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  United  States  has  not  developed  the  possibilities  of  potato 
production,  in  comparison  with  Europe,  and  thus  far  she  has 
been  able  to  get  along  comfortably  with  a  scanty  supply.  The 
simple  fact  is  that  Americans  do  not  have  to  eat  potatoes — much. 
The  quantity  and  cheapness  of  their  corn  is  the  basic  cause  of 
neglect  of  the  potato.  In  the  United  States  corn  meal  as  a  stock 
food  has  been  cheaper  than  dried  potatoes;  consequently  there 

*  Fairchild,  David:  "Forming  New  Fashions  in  Food,"  National  Geo- 
graphic Magazine,  April,  1018,  p.  362. 


148   POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

has  been  no  steady  outlet  for  the  surplus  of  the  potato  crop.  In 
Germany  conditions  are  different.  A  surplus  of  potatoes  is  regu- 
larly made  into  alcohol,  pig  feed,  and  flour,  all  of  which  keep. 
For  pig  feed  there  is  in  any  country  an  almost  indefinite  demand. 
Hence  the  German  farmer  knows  that  the  price  of  potatoes 
will  not  go  below  a  reasonable  figure,  and  he  can  therefore  grow 
the  crop  with  some  security.  In  the  United  States,  on  the  other 
hand,  potatoes  are  grown  only  as  food  for  man.  If,  at  the  end 
of  the  season,  from  March  to  June,  there  is  a  scarcity,  the  price 
rises  to  unreasonable  figures,  such  as  $3  to  $4  a  bushel  in  1917. 
If  there  is  plenty,  the  price  falls  to  equally  unreasonable  figures 
—forty  cents  a  bushel  (as  in  1918).  In  a  recent  five-year  period 
there  was  a  price  fluctuation  of  twenty-seven  cents  per  bushel  in 
Berlin,  and  of  $1.34  in  Chicago. 

This  seesaw  of  big  crop  and  little  price,  little  crop  and  big 
price,  has  gone  on  in  the  United  States  and  Canada  for  forty 
years.  Every  potato  grower,  to  his  sorrow,  knows  all  about  it. 
Therefore  the  American  former  is  afraid  to  grow  potatoes  be- 
cause of  the  danger  of  overproduction,  and  our  total  potato  crop 
bears  no  more  definite  relation  to  our  total  potato  possibilities 
than  the  amount  of  water  sold  bears  to  the  amount  of  water 
produced  in  the  springs  and  mountains  of  the  country.* 

Owing  to  the  previously  mentioned  difficulties  of  transport, 
potatoes  are  usually  grown  near  the  place  of  consumption.  In 
fact,  a  map  of  potato  production  in  the  United  States  would 
enable  us  to  locate  most  of  the  cities  of  the  country.  There  are, 
however,  a  few  centers  of  heavy  production  away  from  cities; 
one  is  in  the  eastern  counties  of  Virginia  and  Maryland,  which 
have  the  advantage  of  cheap  water  and  excellent  railroad  trans- 
portation to  Baltimore,  Washington,  Philadelphia,  New  York, 
and  Boston.  Similarly  western  Michigan  has  cheap  lake  trans- 
port to  Chicago.  Central  Wisconsin  is  not  far  from  Milwaukee 
and  the  Chicago  district.  An  important  district  northwest  of 
Minneapolis  yields  all  the  produce  markets  will  take  and  some- 
times more.  Aroostook  County,  Maine,  has  New  England  for 

"  It  will  be  remembered  that  in  response  to  the  appeal  made  last  year 
by  our  Government  there  was  harvested  in  California  an  increase  of  30,000 
acres  over  the  year  before.  The  experience  was  not  satisfactory  to  the 
growers;  hence  the  acreage  this  year  shows  a  falling  off  of  12,000  acres." — 
California  Development  Board — From,  Monthly  Bulletin  for  July,  1918. 


POTATO  AND  COOL  CLIMATE  149 

its  market,  and  carries  on  an  important  seed  business  with  other 
sections  of  the  country,  especially  along  the  Atlantic  Coast. 

The  maps  of  production  show  how  distinctly  the  potato  crop  is 
separated  from  the  corn  crop.  None  of  the  first  ten  corn  states,* 
save  Minnesota  in  1917,  is  among  the  first  six  potato  states,!  and 
the  seventh  potato  state,  Ohio,  is  also  the  eighth  corn  state,  because 
it  raises  potatoes  in  the  high  and  cool  northeastern  part,  and  corn 


BEP«£SENTR 


Fio.  53. — Potato  centers,  showing  city  locations  in  some  cases  and  good 
agricultural  locations  in  others.  (O.  E.  Baker,  Year  Book  of  U.  S.  Dept. 
Agr.,  1915.) 

in  the  western  and  southwestern  part.  Minnesota  gets  into  both 
groups  by  having  one  part  of  the  state  in  the  corn  climate  and 
another  part  in  the  potato  climate.  Michigan  has  a  good  corn- 
belt  in  the  southern  end  of  the  lower  peninsula  and  an  important 
potato  production  in  the  rest  of  the  state.  Potatoes  and  corn  do 
not  belong  on  the  same  farm  because  they  both  claim  the  farmer's 
attention  and  his  horses  at  the  same  time. 

Growing  potatoes  as  a  money  crop  is  for  the  most  part  concen- 

*  Illinois,  418  million  bushels;  Iowa,  410;  Missouri,  252;  Nebraska,  240; 
Indiana,  203;  Kansas,  128;  Kentucky,  122;  Ohio,  150;  Tennessee,  111; 
Minnesota,  90. 

tNew  York,  38  million  bushels;  Michigan,  36;  Wisconsin,  35;  Min- 
nesota, 34;  Pennsylvania.  29;  Maine,  20. 


150      POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

trated  in  certain  districts.  In  Aroostook  County,  in  the  St. 
John  River  Valley  of  northern  Maine,  agriculture,  which  had 
greatly  declined,  has  suddenly  revived  on  account  of  the  rapid 
rise  of  the  value  of  potatoes  as  an  export  money  crop  for  that 
district.  Similarly,  Monmouth  County,  New  Jersey,  between 
New  York  and  Philadelphia,  has  become  a  potato  center,  ship- 
ping to  these  two  great  cities  as  much  as  600,000  barrels  in  a 
single  season.  Much  of  the  sandy  soil  of  the  Atlantic  Plain 
from  the  eastern  end  of  Long  Island  to  Florida  is  better  suited 
to  potatoes  than  to  grain  crops ;  and  on  eastern  Long  Island,  as 
in  the  only  two  counties  of  Virginia  that  lie  east  of  the  Chesa- 
peake, the  shipments  of  potatoes  have  within  a  decade  made  the 
farmers  very  prosperous.  In  nearly  every  case  these  concen- 
trations of  production  are  in  large  part  due  to  co-operative  asso- 
ciations of  growers,  which  have  greatly  assisted  their  members  in 
the  marketing  of  their  product  as  well  as  in  the  purchase  of 
supplies,  and  the  spread  of  technical  knowledge  how  best  to  grow 
and  pack  the  crop. 

THE  SUPPLY  OF  EARLY  POTATOES 

The  supply  of  early  potatoes  for  northern  markets  from  south- 
ern lands  is  an  important  industry  in  many  parts  of  the  world. 
For  instance,  Algeria  derives  a  large  income  from  potatoes  which 
reach  Paris  in  thirty-five  to  forty  hours.  Egypt  sends  the  first 
potatoes  of  the  season  across  the  Mediterranean  to  northwestern 
Europe.  The  Isle  of  Jersey  in  the  English  Channel,  and  St. 
Malo  on  the  nearby  coast  of  France,  send  early  potatoes  to  Eng- 
land, and  Cornwall  can  send  potatoes  into  London  several  weeks 
earlier  than  the  eastern  part  of  England  can  supply  them.  In 
American  cities  the  earliest  supply  of  new  potatoes  comes  into 
the  market  before  Christmas  from  southern  Florida  and  the 
islands  of  Bermuda,  situated  600  miles  from  New  York,  in  the 
latitude  of  South  Carolina,  in  the  frost-free  climate  furnished  by 
the  Gulf  Stream.  The  more  even  temperature  of  the  oceanic 
as  compared  with  the  continental  climate  thus  becomes  the  basis 
of  Bermuda's  chief  export,  80,000  to  100,000  bushels  a  year. 
The  next  potatoes  for  the  northern  cities  of  the  United  States  are 
from  northern  Florida,  where  there  is  but  little  frost  and  pota- 


POTATO  AS  AN  EARLY  VEGETABLE 


151 


toes  can  grow  throughout  most  of  the  winter.  Then,  as  the 
spring  advances  northward,  potatoes  come  from  other  accessible 
points  in  the  Atlantic  Plain,  such  as  Savannah,  Georgia ;  Charles- 
ton, South  Carolina;  New  Berne,  North  Carolina;  and  south- 
eastern Virginia  near  Norfolk.*  With  the  coming  of  June,  pota- 


EARLY   POTATOES 
BEGINNING  OF  DIGGING 


FIG.  54. — A  good  explanation  of  the  reason   for  north  and  south  trade. 
(Finch  and  Baker.) 

toes  are  harvested  on  the  peninsula  east  of  the  Chesapeake  Bay ; 
then  southern  New  Jersey  and  Long  Island  in  their  turn  send 
carloads  and  trainloads  of  new  potatoes  to  the  Northern  and 
Western  States.  As  spring  moves  up  the  coast  from  Florida 
to  Long  Island,  the  price  of  new  potatoes  in  Northern  cities 
steadily  declines,  and  each  locality  holds  the  market  but  a  short 
time.  Yet  this  warm,  coastal  plain  is  not  the  ideal  place  for 

*  Th«>  reclaimed  swamp  lands  near  the  Dismal  Swamp  are  excellent  for 
potatoes,  and  one  grower  there  has  produced  25,000  barrels  in  a  season. 


152      POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

the  potato;  and  the  whole  plain  from  end  to  end  does  not  pro- 
duce as  many  potatoes  as  the  state  of  Maine.  To  keep  the  potato 
plant  from  degenerating,  the  coastal  plain  crop  is  regularly 
grown  from  seed  potatoes  produced  in  Maine,  where  the  species 
maintains  the  desired  vigor  and  rapidity  of  growth.  The  plants 
grown  from  Northern  seed  seem  to  step  lively  for  a  generation 
or  two  in  the  more  leisurely  Southland.  Then  they  find  out 
that  there  is  no  hurry,  and  the  grower  must  send  for  fresh 
seed.* 

The  main  supply  of  the  country  for  the  winter  months  comes 
from  the  Northern  potato  districts  between  Maine  and  Minnesota. 

The  potato  is  also  important  in  the  irrigated  lands  of  the 
Rocky  Mountains  and  Pacific  States  where  the  cool  nights  forbid 
the  growth  of  corn  and  the  expense  of  irrigation  demands  a  crop 
with  heavy  yield. 

THE  POTATO  IN  FOREIGN  TRADE 

Because  of  the  great  bulk  and  weight  of  potatoes  in  proportion 
to  their  value,  and  because  of  their  perishable  nature,  they  are 
far  less  important  in  international  trade  than  in  home  produc- 
tion. In  general,  they  have  a  tendency  to  become  a  national 
supply  crop,  just  as  in  the  United  States  they  are  a  semi- 
suburban  supply  crop,  with  their  commercial  opportunities  lim- 
ited to  emergencies  and  early  supplies.  When,  as  occasionally 
happens,  there  is  a  shortage  in  the  United  States,  supplies  come 
by  the  hundreds  of  thousands  and  even  millions  of  bushels  from 
Canada,  Ireland,  Scotland,  Germany,  and  Egypt.  One  reason 
why  the  price  of  potatoes  in  America  in  the  spring  of  1917  rose 
to  such  famine  heights  was  the  impossibility  of  lowering  the  price 
by  importation.  In  a  similar  period  in  1911,  12,000,000  bushels 
had  been  imported,  a  quantity  which  would  have  materially 
lowered  the  price  of  1917. 

Considered  in  relation  to  the  total  value  of  the  crop,  the  sta- 

*The  varieties  of  potato  now  cultivated  are  derived  from  the  wild 
potato  of  cool  plateaus  in  South  America.  At  10,500  feet  elevation  on 
the  road  from  Lima  to  Oroya  in  the  Andean  plateau  the  traveler  passes 
through  an  extensively  cultivated  potato  district.  Those  in  low-lying 
tropic  lands  have  thus  far  been  neglected.  Here  is  an  interesting  pos- 
sibility for  warm  lands. 


POTATO  IN  FOREIGN  TRADE  153 

tistics  of  foreign  trade  in  potatoes  are  conspicuous  for  the  small 
and  irregular  amounts : 

Potato  exports  Potato  imports 

million  bushels  million  bushels 

1907  1.20  .40 

1908  .76  8.38 

1909  1.00  .35 

1910  2.38  .22 

1911  1.24  13.73 

1912  2.02  .33 

1913  1.79  3.64 

1914  3.13  .27 

1915  4.01  .20 

1916  2.48  3.07 

These  figures  show  that  the  potato  production  is  limited  by  the 
home  market  and  not  at  all  by  the  land  possibilities.  The 
4,100,000  acres  of  American  and  Canadian  potato  fields  are  an 
insignificant  patch.  Multiplied  by  thirty,  they  about  equal  the 
corn  acreage  of  the  same  countries.  These  120,000,000  acres  of 
possible  potato  land  lie  in  a  broad  belt  from  Newfoundland 
through  maritime  Canada,  through  New  England,  New  York, 
and  Pennsylvania,  the  Lake  District,  both  American  and  Cana- 
dian, and  thence  along  the  upper  edge  of  the  spring  wheat-belt, 
whence,  except  for  small  breaks,  they  may  possibly  extend  almost 
uninterruptedly  into  the  Yukon  Valley,  where,  beneath  the  glow 
of  the  almost  continuous  sunlight  near  the  Arctic  Circle,  potatoes 
have  been  found  to  thrive  amazingly.  This  cooler  belt  in  North 
America  is  now  so  sparsely  peopled  chiefly  because  there  is  no 
great  demand  for  the  crop  it  can  best  grow.  There  is  no  reason 
why  the  region  may  not  in  future  decades  produce  other  Den- 
marks,  Finlands,  Swedens,  Norways,  with  many  potatoes,  and 
hardy,  keen,  and  vigorous  men.  Already  in  northern  Ontario 
there  has  been  organized  a  potato  growers'  association  which  is 
trying  to  overcome  the  disadvantages  of  distant  location  by  de- 
veloping a  specialty  of  seed  production,  after  the  fashion  of 
Aroostook,  Maine,  but  that  merely  serves  to  show  the  meagerness 
of  the  market. 

On  Prince  Edward  Island  the  potato  crop  is  about  seventy  to 
eighty  bushels  per  capita.  In  northern  Minnesota  the  professors 
of  agriculture  say  that  the  potato  is  one  of  their  finest  crops,  that 


154       POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

it  does  splendidly  in  rotation  with  wheat  and  clover,  but  that  they 
can  also  do  equally  well  with  a  four-year  rotation  of  wheat,  corn, 
(silo)  clover,  and  potatoes,  combining  potato  growing  with  dairy 
farming.  In  the  light  ot  Professor  Lusk's  previously  mentioned 
example  of  the  man  who  lived  on  potatoes  and  vegetable  fat,  this 
Minnesota  (or  it  might  be  Wisconsin,  or  Michigan,  or  Ontario, 
or  Yukon)  farm,  producing  potatoes,  milk,  butter,  or  cheese, 
offers  a  complete  ration  to  the  followers  of  the  simple  life. 
Numerous  experiments  have  shown  that  milk  and  potatoes  are 
an  ample  but  no  doubt  monotonous  means  of  support  for  a  man 
in  good  health. 

Potatoes  are  most  easily  grown  on  that  dead  level,  stoneless, 
treeless  lake  bed  that  we  now  call  the  Red  River  Valley  of  the 
North,  stretching  from  the. tip  of  South  Dakota  through  North 
Dakota  and  Minnesota  and  far  into  Manitoba.  The  spring  wheat 
climate  is  also  the  potato  climate,  and  the  perfectly  smooth  and 
level  soil  permits  the  maximum  use  of  machinery,  so  that,  despite 
high  wages,  it  is  said  that  before  the  war  potatoes  could  be  grown 
for  twenty-five  cents  a  bushel.  Of  course  there  was  no  demand 
for  any  large  quantity,  nor  is  there  any  immediate  prospect  of 
such  demand,  but  the  resources  are  there,  should  the  need  arise. 

The  wheat  shortage  during  the  Great  War  has  caused  the  build- 
ing of  potato  flour  factories  in  a  number  of  locations  rather 
remote  from  city  markets,  in  Maine,  Michigan,  Wisconsin, 
Minnesota,  Idaho,  Oregon,  and  California.  Six  carloads  of  fresh 
potatoes  come  into  the  drying  factory,  perishable,  ready  to  spoil 
from  freezing  or  from  heat;  but  one  car  takes  them  out  dried, 
ready  to  ship  to  the  far  end  of  the  world  and  keep  through 
desert  heat  and  Arctic  cold  for  five  years  if  necessary.* 

In  addition  to  this  large  potato  area  of  the  North,  there  is  also 
the  possibility  of  extensive  potato  growing  if  need  be  in  much 
of  the  South.  From  the  Chesapeake  Bay  around  through  all 
the  South  Atlantic  and  Gulf  States  into  Texas,  a  crop  of  early 
potatoes  can  be  followed  by  a  crop  of  the  great  standby,  corn, 
and  in  the  corn  can  be  grown  cowpeas,  velvet  beans,  or  some 
other  legume,  which  enriches  the  ground  for  the  next  year's 
winter  crop  of  potatoes,  thus  giving  a  three-crop  rotation  with 

*  Tho  United  States  had  forty  thousand  pounds  capacity  of  potato  flour 
per  day  December  15,  1918. 


POTATO  POSSIBILITIES  155 

two  great  food  crops  within  the  space  of  a  single  twelve  months 
— and  with  actual  improvement  of  the  humus  and  nitrogen  con- 
tent of  the  soil,  and  considerable  pickings  for  pasturing  animals. 
We  may  also  reasonably  expect  improvement  in  varieties  by 
breeding,  for  which  purpose  explorers  have  been  sent  to  Peru 
to  get  hardy  wild  plants.  By  breeding,  Germany  has  doubled 
the  starch  content  of  her  potatoes. 

THE   SWEET   POTATO 

The  white  potato  has  a  partner — the  sweet  potato,  a  member  of 
the  morning-glory  family,  probably  a  native  of  the  American 
tropics.  In  the  more  humid  warm  temperate  and  tropical 
regions  it  corresponds  to  the  white  potato  in  the  humid,  cool 
temperate  regions.  It  has  one  advantage  over  the  white  potato : 
it  grows  on  the  sandiest  and  poorest  soils.  Commercially  it 
suffers  from  a  great  handicap.  We  have  been  unable  to  utilize 
the  sweet  potato  to  anything  approaching  its  proper  extent,  be- 
cause it  rots  when  exposed  to  temperature  below  45°.*  Never- 
theless it  is  already  the  second  vegetable  in  importance  in  the 
United  States,  nearly  a  million  acres  being  devoted  to  it  in  1917. 

Land  capable  of  producing  a  bale  of  cotton,  worth,  say  $40,  will 
readily  yield  300  bushels  of  potatoes,  at  half  the  cost  for  cultivation, 
worth,  at  20c.  per  bu.,  $60.  This  the  planter  would  gladly  take,  at 
harvest  time,  but  there  is  then  no  market  at  any  price.  Yet  six  months 
later  be  cannot  supply  the  demand  at  60c.  or  $180  per  acre.  These 
figures  are  conservative.  Even  on  poor  soil,  producing  500  pounds 
seed  cotton  (one-third  of  a  bale)  per  acre,  the  yield  in  sweet  potatoes 
(100  bushels,  a  very  small  output)  could  be  sold  in  the  spring  for 
$GO  were  it  possible  to  successfully  keep  the  tubers  through  the  winter. 
Many  succeed  in  so  doing,  and  reap  the  reward,  but  it  is  still  an 
unsolved  general  problem.* 

It  seems  even  more  advisable  to  dry  the  sweet  potato  than  the 
white  potato,  because  it  promises  a  more  appetizing  addition  to 
our  food-supply. 

Dried  sweet-potato  slices  form  one  of  the  most  successful  of  all 
dried  vegetables,  for  they  "  come  back "  when  soaked,  retain  their 
sweetness  and  flavor,  and  can  be  fried  or  candied  in  a  most  appetizing 

*  Bailey,  L.  H.:  Cyclopedia  of  American  Horticulture,  p.  1755. 


156   POTATOES— STARCH  FOOD  OF  THE  NORTH 

way.  The  longing  of  our  Southern  boys  in  France  for  their  favorite 
vegetable  could  be  easily  met  by  the  use  of  these  dried  sweet-potato 
slices.  .  .  . 

While  the  sweet  potato  has  not  as  much  protein  as  the  white  potato, 
it  has  much  more  sugar — towards  the  close  of  the  storage  season  it 
has  as  much  as  27  per  cent,  reckoned  on  the  dry  substance.  It  is  richer 
in  carbohydrates,  and  produces  flour  of  such  excellence  that  the  follow- 
ing comments  have  been  gathered  from  experienced  cooks,  who  have 
tried  it :  "  It  makes  just  as  good  ginger-bread  as  any  " ;  "  Better  muffins 
than  Graham  ones " ;  when  used  with  corn-meal,  "  Delicious  griddle- 
cakes  " ;  "  The  best  I  have  ever  tasted  in  whole-wheat  bread  " ;  "  It  gave 
no  new  flavor  and  saved  adding  so  much  shortening";  "In  pastry  we 
found  it  most  satisfactory." 

For  almost  a  year,  the  director  of  the  Tuskegee  Institute  writes, 
the  baker  of  the  institution  has  saved  200  pounds  of  white  flour  a  day 
by  the  use  of  sweet-potato  flour  (one-third  sweet-potato  to  two-thirds 
wheat  flour),  and  the  resulting  bread  has  not  only  become  the  favorite 
among  the  pupils,  but  among  the  citizens  of  Tuskegee  as  well. 

When  one  considers  that  the  sweet  potato  crop  takes  fifteen  per  cent, 
less  potash  fertilizer  than  the  white  potato;  that  the  seed  is  much 
cheaper;  that  there  are  two  planting  seasons  possible;  that  the  yields 
on  poor  soils  with  little  humus  are  large,  as  high  as  100  bushels — even 
700  bushels  are  recorded;  that  it  grows  in  the  region  of  our  cheapest 
labor,  and  that  that  labor  understands  its  culture;  and  then  combines 
these  facts  with  the  experience  of  those  who  have  dried  the  sweet  potato 
and  actually  made  a  fine  flour  out  of  it,  one  is  forced  to  the  conclusion 
that  only  a  demand  for  the  dried  sweet-potato  product  is  necessary  in 
order  to  establish  the  industry  firmly.* 

The  sweet  potato  is  a  perennial  where  there  is  no  frost,  yet  it 
will  make  a  crop  in  the  warm  summer  as  far  north  as  Iowa  or 
New  York,  and  is  consequently  a  crop  of  considerable  impor- 
tance in  American  agriculture.  Fortunately  the  sweet  potato 
requires  even  lighter  and  sandier  soil  than  the  white  potato  and 
is,  therefore,  extensively  grown  on  the  sandy  lands  of  the  coastal 
plain  in  New  Jersey,  Maryland,  and  Virginia,  where  it  is  largely 
produced  for  shipment  to  the  northern  states.  Similar  sandy 
spots  in  Iowa,  Illinois,  and  the  North-Central  States  render  simi- 
lar service  for  the  interior  of  the  United  States  and  western 
Canada.  This  crop  is  also  very  widely  grown  throughout  the 
Southern  States  as  a  local  food  supply,  where  the  people  have 
the  alternative  of  rice  or  sweet  potatoes  as  their  chief  starch  food 

*  Fail-child,  David :  "  Forming  New  Fashions  in  Food,"  National  Geo- 
graphic Magazine,  p.  361. 


POTATO   AS  BREAD  SUBSTITUTE  157 

in  addition  to  corn  bread.  Millions  of  acres  of  Southern  land  lie 
almost  waste  because  they  are  poor  and  sandy — but  they  are 
prime  sweet-potato  soil. 

The  ability  of  the  sweet  and  white  potatoes  to  serve  as  sub- 
stitutes for  bread  is  shown  first  of  all  by  the  analyses  of  bread 
and  of  potatoes.  Most  persons  have  at  least  observed  those  who 
eat  no  bread  at  a  meal  at  which  they  eat  potatoes.  It  cannot  be 
emphasized  too  strongly  in  this  connection  that  our  food  is 
largely  a  matter  of  habit.  If  we  are  in  the  habit  of  eating  bread, 
we  probably  want  it  for  a  time  at  least,  regardless  of  the  dietary 
sufficiency  of  a  substitute  food  which  it  has  not  been  our  habit 
to  eat.  The  vital  thing,  however,  is  that  we  get  certain  elements 
of  nutrition  which  we  must  have,  and  can  get  from  great  num- 
bers of  different  articles  of  diet.  It  is  also  important  that  we  put 
a  certain  amount  of  material  into  our  digestive  tract.  After  that 
it  is  chiefly  habit,  not  need.  In  parts  of  southern  Virginia  one 
may  see  educated  people  at  a  picnic  contentedly  feasting  with  a 
piece  of  fried  chicken  in  one  hand  and  a  cold  sweet  potato  in  the 
other — protein  and  carbohydrate,  meat  and  a  bread  substitute. 
During  the  flour  shortage  of  the  Great  War  the  hotels  in  Porto 
Rico  served  slices  of  sweet  potatoes  in  place  of  bread.  It  is  of 
course  well  known  that  many  millions  of  people  in  Europe  have 
of  late  had  almost  no  bread  at  times,  but  have  subsisted  on  po- 
tatoes in  its  place.  From  personal  experience  I  know  that  white 
potatoes  and  corn  meal  make  muffins  that  are  excellent  when 
eaten  hot. 

If  we  had  to  choose  between  doing  without  bread  or  potatoes, 
many  people,  perhaps  even  the  majority  in  some  localities,  would 
go  without  the  bread.  Only  those  who  have  overlooked  the 
potato  can  talk  of  impending  famine  in  North  America.  The 
greatest  of  all  fears  for  the  American  potato  grower,  as  for 
the  grower  of  many  other  foods,  is  of  a  big  crop  throughout  the 
country  which  will  put  his  price  down  to  the  point  where  he 
makes  no  profit,  or  suffers  actual  loss.  Agricultural  overproduc- 
tion, not  famine,  is  the  problem  of  thousands  and  thousands  of 
American  farmers. 


CHAPTER  VII 
STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS 

THERE  are  hundreds  of  millions  of  people  who  do  not  eat  bread, 
but  that  is  no  sign  that  they  are  savage,  barbarian,  or  even 
heathen.  They  get  carbohydrate  and  protein,  but  they  do  not 
get  them  in  bread  because  the  climate  in  which  they  live  pro- 
duces carbohydrate  and  protein  most  easily  in  other  forms. 
The  tropic  regions  are  often  said  to  have  great  possibilities  for 
the  support  of  human  life.  One  evidence  for  this  statement  is 
the  great  abundance  of  starch-producing  plants  that  are  bread 
substitutes.  Throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  damper 
part  of  the  tropics  several  easily  grown  plants  afford  foods 
which  are  the  essential  equivalent  of  the  bread  so  dearly  beloved 
by  the  Western  World  that  two  thousand  years  ago  it  got  its 
place  in  the  most  widely  used  prayer  in  Christendom.* 

One  of  these  tropic  bread  substitutes  is  the  sweet  potato,  which 
in  the  temperate  zones  is  merely  an  interloper,  an  exotic,  grow- 
ing for  a  short  season  between  frosts,  while  in  its  tropic  home 
it  lives  on  from  year  to  year,  producing  crop  after  crop,  and 
causing  the  tropic  denizen  to  have  small  regret  that  the  white 
potato  will  not  grow  there.  The  sweet  potato  differs  from  the 
white  potato  only  in  its  greater  amount  of  sugar  and  other 
nourishment,  and  in  its  habitat.  Columbus,  on  his  return  to 
Spain,  presented  a  sweet  potato  to  Queen  Isabella,  and  today 
it  is  an  important  root  crop  in  Spain  and  one  of  the  principal 
food  plants  of  the  Madeira  Islanders.  The  Portuguese  seamen 
took  it  to  Japan  when  they  were  the  great  and  powerful  foreign- 

*  Even  the  prayers  of  religion  reflect  man's  environment,  and  the  col- 
lection of  the  food  references  in  the  prayers  of  mankind  would  doubtless 
afford  an  interesting  variety.  When  missionaries  tried  to  translate  the 
Bible  for  the  native  of  (Greenland,  they  got  no  response  until  they  sub- 
stituted seals  for  sheep,  which  at  once  enlivened  many  a  previously  dead 
passage  in  the  Old  Testament,  that  great  book  of  a  pastoral  people. 

158 


POTATOES  FOR  ALL  CLIMATES  159 

ers  in  the  eyes  of  the  Japanese.  Today  the  sweet  potato  forms 
one  of  the  principal  crops  grown  on  the  upland  fields  of  south- 
western Japan,  and  is  a  most  important  food  of  the  poorer 
classes.  But  it  is  in  the  torrid  zone  that  it  reaches  its  greatest 
importance.  Here  its  growth  is  almost  universal,  whether  in 
South  America,  Central  America,  the  West  Indian  Islands,  the 
coasts  of  Africa,  or  the  Malay  Peninsula. 

Very  similar  plants  called  yams  produce  roots  large  enough 
to  weigh  40  to  50  pounds  (occasionally  100)  ;  but  they  have 
almost  no  importance  in  international  trade  because  of  their 
many  rivals  in  the  tropics,  the  universal  ease  of  their  produc- 
tion, and  the  fact  that  there  arc  few  tropic  cities  large  enough 
to  furnish  a  great  market  for  agricultural  products.  Mr.  David 
Fairchild,  of  the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  thinks 
that  the  only  reason  we  do  not  import  yams  is  because  we  do 
not  know  them;  he  says  a  baked  Jamaica  yam  of  the  "yampie" 
variety  is  better  than  our  baked  potato.  In  the  winter,  fully 
forty  per  cent,  of  the  black  women  one  meets  walking  to  Jamaica 
markets  with  baskets  of  produce  on  their  heads  are  carrying 
yams,  the  staple  food  plant  of  the  Jamaica  black,  and  an  im- 
portant vegetable  for  the  whites.  The  common  method  of  grow- 
ing the  yam  is  to  let  the  vines  run  on  poles,  and  carefully  to 
remove  the  big  fleshy  roots  from  time  to  time  without  disturbing 
the  plant.  The  fact  that  it  grows  at  high  altitudes  gives  it  a 
placr  of  importance  among  the  eventual  food  resources  of  the 
world. 

CASSAVA 

Cassava,  one  of  the  tropic  rivals  of  the  sweet  potato,  helps  to 
fill  the  local  need  in  many  lands,  and  far  exceeds  the  sweet 
potato  in  importance  in  international  commerce  by  producing 
for  the  peoples  of  the  temperate  zone  the  dried  starch  product 
called  tapioca.  The  United  States  imported  sixty  million  pounds 
of  cassava  and  tapioca  in  1911  at  an  invoice  cost  of  2.3  cents 
per  pound — a  low  figure  which  indicates  the  great  value  of  the 
plant  to  man.  Like  the  sweet  potato,  oassava  is  grown  for 
its  starch-producing  roots.  The  plant  reaches  a  height  of  8  or 
10  feet,  and  develops  roots  about  2  inches  thick  and  sometimes 
6  feet  long  (usually  much  less).  The  raw  root  contains  the 


160 


STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS 


deadly  poison  prussic  acid,  which,  fortunately  for  man,  is  de- 
stroyed by  heat,  so  that  boiling  the  root  renders  it  entirely 
harmless.  The  native  then  grates  and  dries  it,  making  of  it 
not  only  a  nutritive  equivalent  of  bread,  but  actually  a  piece  of 
bread,  although  it  is  not  the  light  bread  to  which  the  Northern 


FIG.  55. — Girl  selling  cassava  cakes  in  native  market,  Hayti. 
acclimatization.     (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 


Office  crop 


world  is  accustomed,  but  a  thin,  stiff  cake,  rather  insipid  to  the 
wheat-eating  palate. 

Cassava  is  native  to  America,  but  it  is  distributed  through- 
out the  tropics  and  is  extensively  used  for  food  in  many  regions, 
especially  in  Brazil,  Guiana,  the  West  Indies,  West  Africa,  the 
East  Indian  Islands,  and  the  Malay  Peninsula.  The  Congo 
natives  eat  cassava  as  the  principal  breadstuff.  It  requires  fully 
nine  months  in  which  to  mature,  quite  as  long  as  wheat,  and 
longer  than  any  other  of  our  ordinary  foodstuffs — its  cultivation 
furnishes  an  example  of  sustained  industry  that  does  not  accord 
with  some  of  our  notions  of  the  "savage." 


BREAD  FROM  ROOTS 


161 


In  Jamaica,  one  of  the  few  tropic  territories  of  which  we 
have  statistics,  cassava  ranks  third  among  the  ground  provisions 
which  are  the  principal  articles  of  food  among  the  natives,  yams 
coming  first,  and  sweet  potatoes  second. 

In  all  these  lands,  cassava  cakes  and  boiled  or  baked  cassava 
roots  are  standard  articles  of  diet  for  the  natives,  partially  tak- 
ing the  place  of  the  corn  bread  of  the  American  negro,  the  boiled 


FIG.  50. — Sweetmeat, — ground  root  of  cassava  nweetened  with  coarse, 
unbleached  sugar  called  rapadon,  purchased  in  market  of  Las  Cahopas, 
Hayti,  1917.  (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

potatoes  and  rye  bread  of  the  European  peasant,  and  all  the 
other  breadstuffs  of  the  temperate  zone. 

Experiments  along  the  Gulf  Coast  seem  to  indicate  the  possi- 
bility of  extensive  cassava  growth  in  this  section  of  the  United 
States  if  the  demand  should  arise. 

The  limited  space  given  to  discussion  of  the  cassava  should 
not  cause  one  to  overlook  the  fact  that  its  importance  as  a  human 
food  is  probably  several  times  that  of  the  potato  of  North 
America  or  the  wheat  imports  of  Britain.  The  possibility  of 
importing  the  cassava  product  into  the  temperate  zone  is  limited 
only  by  the  desires  of  the  inhabitants  of  that  zone.  If  it  had 
had  a  price  of  five  cents  a  pound  before  the  war,  its  importance 
in  world  trade  might  have  been  several  times  as  great  as  that 
of  wheat.  Mr.  Wm.  Stuart  of  the  United  States  Department  of 
Agriculture  quotes  the  Trinidad  Department  of  Agriculture  to 
the  effect  that  cassava  is  more  productive  on  the  average  than 
potatoes  in  the  United  States. 


162 


STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS 


THE  DASHEEN 

The  dasheen  serves  as  an  instance  of  the  food  possibilities  of 
the  world,  and  of  our  ignorance  of  the  foods  of  distant  peoples. 


FIGS.  57  and  58. — Plants,  and  roots  of  the  edible  dasheen.  The  ruler 
shows  the  size  of  the  roots.  One  hill  produced  the  twenty-three  pounds, 
of  which  five  weighed  11%  pounds,  eight  weighed  2%  pounds,  and  forty- 
nine  weighed  8%  pounds.  (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 


"We  usually  think  of  the  caladium,  or  common  elephant's  ear, 
merely  as  an  ornament  that  waves  its  leaves  on  our  lawns.    Yet 


A  TROPIC  BREAD  SUBSTITUTE  163 

when  white  men  discovered  Hawaii,  they  were  amazed  at  the 
size  of  the  brown  men,  who  often  weighed  300  pounds  and  whose 
fat  was  due  to  eating  poi,  their  favorite  dish,  made  from  the  taro 
plant,  one  of  the  hundred  cultivated  varieties  of  the  elephant's 
ear  or  dasheen.  This  plant  thrives  in  wet  lands.  In  food  value 
it  is  the  brother  of  the  white  and  the  sweet  potato.  In  contrast 
to  them,  like  rice,  it  thrives  in  the  swamp.  It  has  been  intro- 
duced into  the  United  States,  thrives  over  large  areas  in  the 
South,  and  has  been  reported  good  by  those  who  have  eaten  it. 
It  may  some  day  be  one  of  our  important  crops.  Certainly  it  will 
be  if  there  is  any  prospect  of  food  shortage. 

THE  BANANA 

The  banana  is  another  great  starch  food,  a  bread  equivalent, 
and  tropic  rival  of  the  potato,  the  sweet  potato,  rice,  and  cassava. 
It  has  been  cultivated  so  long  that  it  has  ceased  to  produce  seed. 
Wherever  the  climate  is  always  warm  and  the  rainfall  suffices 
to  support  a  dense  tropic  forest,  the  banana  is  at  home.  The 
banana  belt  extends  round  the  world  and  slightly  into  the  tem- 
perate zones.  With  its  great  bunches  of  fruit  the  banana  is 
almost  without  a  peer  among  nature's  gifts  to  man.  Wheat, 
corn,  rice,  and  the  potato  arc  produced  by  arduous  labor  and 
tillage  of  the  soil ;  but  if  the  root  of  a  banana  tree  is  thrust 
into  favorable  tropical  earth  and  nearby  rival  plants  arc  given 
a  few  blows  with  the  machete  (a  sword-like  knife  very  com- 
mon in  the  tropics)  to  keep  the  young  banana  plant  from  being 
overgrown,  in  a  few  months  it  gives  its  great  gift  of  fruit.  For 
years  thereafter  the  shoots  which  the  original  plant  sends  up 
continue  to  furnish  food  throughout  most  of  the  year.  It  is 
reported  *  that  in  Parana,  the  southern  state  of  Brazil,  banana 
plants  have  stood  for  thirty  years  with  this  slight  care,  and 
still  produce  bunches  of  seventy  bananas  each.  Banana  planta- 
tions are  sometimes  started  by  chopping  down  the  forest,  burn- 
ing all  the  smaller  growth,  and  planting  the  banana  shoots 
among  the  logs,  which  the  white  ants  kindly  cat  up  in  a  few 
months. 

The  amount  of  food  produced  per  acre  is  greater  than  that 
*  See  Fawcett,  VV. :  The  Banana,  Its  Cultivation,  London,  1013. 


164  STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS 

from  any  of  our  favorite  bread  grains,  though  far  less  than 
is  often  reported.  It  about  equals  that  of  the  potato.  Two 
hundred  to  three  hundred  bunches  per  acre  (U.  S.  Con.  Rep., 
1911)  are  considered  a  good  crop  in  Jamaica,*  and  the  drain 
upon  the  soil  is  less  than  that  made  by  a  small  crop  of  wheat. 
The  elimination  of  plowing  reduces  to  a  minimum  the  waste 
of  soil  by  erosion,  which  has  nearly  destroyed  the  productivity  of 
the  ancient  world,  and  which  is  destroying  much  of  the  United 
States  at  an  even  more  rapid  rate. 

More  than  any  other  plant,  the  banana  helps  to  make  life 
easy  in  the  tropics.  In  parts  of  the  Congo  Basin  and  other 
humid  portions  of  central  Africa,  where  the  climate  is  bad  for 
the  white  man,  the  nutritious  banana  is  said  to  be  the  main 
article  of  diet  for  many,  probably  scores  of  millions,  of  the 
negro  race.  It  corresponds  to  the  potato  of  the  north  Euro- 
pean peasant,  and  the  rice  of  the  southern  Chinese. 

Stanley,  in  Darkest  Africa,  refers  to  specimens  of  plan- 
tains, a  close  relative  of  the  banana,  that  were  "  12  inches  long, 
2l/2  inches  in  diameter,  and  nearly  8  inches  round,  large  enough 
to  furnish  even  Saat  Tato,  the  hunter,  with  his  long-desired  full 

meal."t 

Stanley  also  says  that  he  found  a  clearing  beyond  Yambuya 
in  the  great  forest,  "three  miles  in  diameter,  abounding  in  native 
produce.  Almost  every  plantain  stalk  bore  an  enormous  bunch 
of  fruit,  with  from  50  to  140  plantains  attached."  He  men- 
tions several  other  places  where  the  plantain  groves  were  ex- 
tensive. 

Scores  of  varieties  of  bananas  and  plantains  are  grown 
throughout  the  East  Indies,  southern  China,  much  of  India, 
many  of  the  West  Indian  Islands,  Central  America,  the  Philip- 
pines, and  other  tropic  lands  from  Mexico  to  Argentina,  from 
Cairo  to  Natal,  and  from  Hong  Kong  to  Queensland. 

The  banana  has  the  advantage  over  all  its  starchy  rivals  in 
being  good  food  without  cooking.  Its  close  relative,  the  plantain, 

*  The  United  Fruit  Co.  reports  an  average  for  a  period  of  years  as 
follows:  Caribbean  mainland,  128-150  stems  per  acre,  average  weight  60-65 
pounds;  Jamaica,  150-200  stems,  average  weight  50-60  pounds. 

t  Mr.  Felix  Reina  of  the  Porto  Rico  Food  Administration  says:  "A 
12-inch  plantain  will  feed  two  persons  at  a  meal  when  it  is  used  instead 
of  bread  as  was  the  case  in  hotels  when  the  wheatless  days  were  in  force 
here.  A  Peon  for  dinner  usually  eats  two  with  dry  codfish." 


A  BANANA  PLANTATION 


165 


I6fi  STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS 

with  fruit  larger  than  the  banana,  must  be  cooked.  It,  too, 
is  very  important  in  many  parts  of  the  tropics.  The  banana 
has  a  commercial  blessing  in  its  method  of  ripening  off  of  the 
stalk  and  in  its  thick  skin.  It  comes  to  us  wrapped  in  a  thick 
germ-proof  skin,  which  makes  it  one  of  the  safest  and  cleanest 
of  fruits  to  eat,  being  in  this  respect  superior  to  the  apple, 
peach,  or  pear.  It  is  a  fruit  easily  transportable  because  of  its 
thick  skin  and  its  ability  to  ripen  after  it  has  been  picked. 
Thus  it  can  be  taken  green  and  hard  from  the  tree  in  the 
tropics,  to  be  used  one  or  two  weeks  later  in  another  clime.  In 
this  respect  it  has  a  great  advantage  over  many  other  tropic 
fruits,  which,  while  delicious,  nutritious,  and  productive,  can- 
not be  transported  any  great  distance,  if  at  all,  without  great  cast. 

BANANAS    IN    COMMERCE 

The  banana,  however,  cannot  easily  be  shipped;  it  has  only 
recently  entered  commerce,  for  it  must  be  moved  with  such  speed 
that  it  has  only  had  wide  dissemination  since  the  invention 
of  artificially  cooled  ships  driven  by  steam  and  artificially  heated 
cars  driven  with  great  speed.  Owing  to  the  necessity  of  quick 
transportation,  it  has  not  long  been  known  to  many  people 
in  the  temperate  zone.  This  gift  of  the  tropics,  delivered  to 
the  temperate  zone  by  the  coal-driven  steamship,  is  a  forerun- 
ner of  many  other  valuable  but  perishable  gifts.  For  the  thirty 
years  prior  to  1899  the  consumption  of  this  fruit  in  the  United 
States  was  doubled  every  five  years.  Since  that  date  its  use 
has  steadily  increased,  because  under  normal  conditions  it  is 
in  many  places  the  cheapest  food  that  can  be  bought  in  America. 
It  competes,  to  a  limited  extent,  with  our  home-grown  fruits, 
with  the  cereals,  and  with  the  potato,  of  which  it  is  almost  a 
duplicate  in  nutritive  content.  (See  table  of  food  values.) 

Because  of  the  difficulty  of  transportation,  only  certain  favored 
locations  in  the  tropics  have  developed  the  exportation  of  ba- 
nanas. The  supply  in  Europe  is  inferior  to  that  in  the  United 
States  because  the  part  of  the  tropics  lying  nearest  Europe  is 
the  Desert  of  Sahara,  where  the  banana  cannot  grow.  The  Euro- 
pean supply  has  for  a  long  time  come  from  Madeira,  the  Cape 
Verde,  and  the  Canary  Islands  off  the  western  coast  of  North 


BANANAS  FOR  WEST  EUROPE         167 

Africa.  Banana  cultivation  on  these  islands  is  carried  on  in  an 
intensive  and  costly  way,  which  is  profitable  because  of  their 
location  near  Europe  and  also  on  the  path  of  steamships  going 
to  Europe  from  Africa  and  South  America.  On  the  island  of 
Teneriffe  (Canary  Islands),  with  its  high  volcanic  peak,  the 
industry  is  centered  in  the  famous  valley  of  Ortava,  to  which 
water  for  irrigation  is  brought  from  the  rainy  side  of  the  island 
by  aqueducts  and  tunnels.  In  some  cases  it  is  pumped  up  a  thou- 
sand feet,  and  in  all  casos  it  must  first  be  obtained  by  driving 
tunnels  into  the  fissured  lava  formations.  One  of  these  tunnels 
is  a  mile  long  and  discharges  3,000,000  gallons  a  day,  in  rainy 
and  dry  seasons  alike,  from  the  melting  snow  on  top  of  the 
mountain.  When  the  war  broke  out  new  tunnels  were  being 
dug  for  the  enlargement  of  the  industry. 

The  island  of  Madeira  (latitude  33°)  is  Teneriffe 's  counter- 
part in  this  exotic  culture.  This,  too,  is  a  volcanic  island  in 
the  trade-wind  zone,  with  a  rainy,  steep  northeast  side,  and 
more  land  on  the  drier  southwest,  to  which  the  water  is  carried 
by  long  cement-lined  aqueducts  (levadas)  around  the  side  of 
the  mountain.  These  were  built  by  negro  slaves  under  Spanish 
masters  more  than  a  century  ago,  but  are  now  for  the  most  part 
owned  by  English  planters  employing  Portuguese  labor,  and 
producing  bananas  for  the  north  European  market.  England 
attempted  to  get  West  Indian  bananas  in  the  early  years  of 
this  century  by  subsidizing  a  line  of  steamers,  but  the  attempt 
was  not  a  success.  It  is  probable  that  the  ultimate  supply  of 
bananas  for  the  European  market  will  come  from  the  wet  west 
coasts  of  Africa;  the  nearest  location  in  this  zone  is  French 
Guinea,  where  the  banana,  entirely  at  home,  yields  fruit  in  ten 
months  instead  of  eighteen  months,  as  at  Teneriffe.  Yet  the 
land  in  Teneriffe,  where  there  is  water  to  irrigate  it,  is  worth 
$1,000  an  acre.  This  circumstance  furnishes  a  good  example 
of  the  influence  of  nearness  to  market,  for  more  productive 
land  not  under  irrigation  lies  unused  in  the  West  Indies,  Cen- 
tral America,  South  America,  and  the  coasts  of  Africa. 

Southern  Brazil  sends  bananas  to  Buenos  Ayres,  and  Queens- 
land sends  this  tropic  product  to  cooler  Australia. 


168  STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS 

IMPORTANCE  IN   CARIBBEAN   COUNTRIES 

The  United  States  is  so  near  to  the  steaming  hot  plains  bor- 
dering the  Caribbean  Sea  and  the  Gulf  of  Mexico  that  bananas 
can  readily  be  supplied  to  that  country,  and  in  no  other  cool 
region  are  they  so  generally  used.  On  account  of  the  unwhole- 
some climate  along  the  Central  American  coasts,  nearly  all  the 
people  live  on  the  more  healthful  interior  plateaus,  so  that  the 
best  banana  lands  have  long  lain  idle.  The  comparatively  new 
banana  commerce,  however,  has  caused  recent  rapid  growth  of 
settlements,  mostly  by  West  Indian  negroes,  with  a  correspond- 
ing increase  of  trade  along  the  low  eastern  coasts.  This  com- 
merce is  a  good  example  of  industrial  production  in  the  tropics, 
accomplished  by  organization,  enterprise,  and  capital  brought  by 
the  more  energetic  denizens  of  cooler  lands.  American  fruit 
companies  began  by  buying  fruit.  Then  they  established  steam- 
ship lines;  then  they  started  plantations,  and  built  railroads  to 
reach  them ;  then  they  built  wharves  from  which  to  load  their 
steamers,  then  hotels  in  which  to  entertain  the  people  whom  they 
persuaded  to  travel  on  their  steamers.  They  carry  thousands 
of  Jamaican  negroes  on  contract  to  work  plantations  in  Hon- 
duras, Guatemala,  Costa  Kica,  Boca  del  Toro  in  Panama,  and 
Santa  Marta  in  northern  Colombia,  whither  the  industry  spread 
as  the  lands  of  Jamaica  became  inadequate.  The  companies  that 
carry  on  this  international  commerce  in  a  great  food  staple 
are  also  often  accused  of  operating  governments  and  revolu- 
tions at  will  in  Latin  America,  and  controlling  the  fruit  market 
in  the  United  States. 

When  the  shiploads  of  bananas  reach  our  ports  they  are  hur- 
ried on  express  trains  to  the  interior.  From  New  Orleans,  lati- 
tude 30°,  whole  trainloads  are  sent  northward  and  northwest- 
ward into  the  lands  of  cotton,  corn,  and  wheat,  and  across  the 
continent  to  the  Pacific  Coast,  where  they  compete  with  the 
bananas  that  come  to  San  Francisco  and  Seattle  from  Hawaii. 
As  a  result  of  this  highly  organized  international  trade  a  hun- 
gry man  on  the  streets  of  many  American  cities  could  be  better 
fed  before  the  war  on  three  cents'  worth  of  bananas  (usually 
two  or  three  bananas)  than  on  three  cents'  worth  of  bread. 
The  scarcity  and  high  price  of  bananas  in  1918  was  due  solely 


THE  NEW  TRADE  IN  BANANAS  169 

to  the  ship  shortage,  and  not  to  any  shortage  of  fruit.    It  rotted 
on  the  Caribbean  shore. 

This  comparatively  new  trade  has  had  effects  little  short  of 
revolutionary  on  industry  along  the  Caribbean.  The  four  and 
one-half  million  bunches,  worth  a  million  dollars,  exported 
from  Boca  del  Toro  in  1911,  constituted  almost  the  entire  ex- 
port from  the  large  territories  of  Panama.  There  is  plenty  of 
room  on  the  Caribbean  for  more  plantations  to  meet  increased 
demand. 


DIFFICULTIES  OF  BANANA  CROWING  IN  THE  HURRICANE  BELT 

The  people  who  live  on  the  shores  of  the  Caribbean  and  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico  have  two  reasons  for  depending  on  the  banana  : 
it  is  to  them  a  great  supply  crop  because  it  is  a  standard  article 
of  food,  and  to  many  of  them  it  is  also  a  very  important  money 
crop.  Jamaica  illustrates  its  importance  as  a  money  crop.  Fruit 
exports  of  that  island,  chiefly  bananas,  have  risen  from  $15,000 
in  1869  to  $350,000  in  1879,  $1,500,000  in  1889,  $4,000,000  in 
1899,  and  $7,500,000  in  1909.  The  very  large  native  population 
on  this  small  mountainous  island  will  probably  prevent  much 
further  increase  in  the  export  of  so  staple  a  food.  But  the 
banana  is  an  uncertain  crop  where  the  tropic  hurricane  occa- 
sionally rages,  north  of  15  °  north  latitude  and  south  of  15  °  south 
latitude.  In  February,  1899,  when  a  fearful  hurricane  swept 
across  the  West  Indies,  the  farmers  could  not  save  their  banana 
trees,  which,  with  their  heavy  burdens  and  weak  stems,  were  an 
easy  prey  to  the  furious  thrashings  of  the  storm.  The  million 
inhabitants  of  Porto  Rico  who  were  supporting  themselves  almost 
entirely  by  agriculture  on  a  hilly  territory  less  than  half  as  large 
as  New  Jersey,  found,  when  sunshine  returned  after  the  storm, 
that  their  bananas  were  beaten  to  the  ground.  As  a  consequence 
the  island  was  on  the  verge  of  famine  for  nearly  a  year,  until 
another  banana  crop  could  spring  up  from  the  roots  of  the 
old  plants.  Yet  the  Porto  Ricans  then  as  now  exported  few 
bananas.  They  were  used  as  a  supply  crop  for  their  own  food 
while  they  produced  coffee,  sugar,  and  tobacco  for  the  foreign 
market.  Similar  storms  occasionally  destroy  the  bananas  in 
Jamaica,  and  the  lines  of  steamers  that  carry  the  fruit  to  the 


170  STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS 

United  States  have  to  be  discontinued  for  some  months,  pend- 
ing the  growing  of  another  crop.  In  Bermuda,  which  often 
comes  under  the  influence  of  several  tropical  hurricanes  a  year, 
the  wind  is  so  strong  that  the  bananas  can  grow  only  in  a  few 
lime-stone  sink  holes  which,  like  protecting  walls,  shelter  the 
plants  on  all  sides. 

The  possibilities  of  the  banana  as  a  food  resource  for  the 
temperate  zone  have  only  begun  to  be  developed.  Already  it  is 
the  cheapest  food  in  the  United  States,  and  its  use  is  spreading 
rapidly  to  country  districts  throughout  the  land.  In  the  tropics 
it  is  often  cooked,  baked,  boiled,  fried,  made  into  chips,  and 
French  fried.  In  some  countries,  Peru,  for  example,  it  is  con- 
verted into  flour  and  used  with  butter.  Very  suggestive  is  a 
Hawaiian  discovery,  a  war  bread  now  manufactured  and  sold 
in  all  bakeries,  made  of  thirty  per  cent,  banana  pulp  and  sixty 
per  cent,  white  flour — the  invention  of  a  pastry  cook  in  a  Hono- 
lulu hotel.  Perhaps  the  future  bakers  of  Chicago  and  Chris- 
tiania  will  for  a  part  of  their  mixture  roll  out  a  cask  of  banana 
pulp,  frozen  in  a  fruit  preserving  factory  on  the  banks  of 
Congo  or  the  shores  of  Papua  or  Albert  Nyanza.  The  food  value 
of  banana  flour,  which  will  keep  almost  indefinitely,  bears  a 
surprising  resemblance  to  that  of  wheat  flour;  its  somewhat 
small  proportion  of  protein  makes  it  almost  the  exact  duplicate 
of  rice  in  the  food  analysis. 

According  to  the  eminent  English  dietetic  expert,  Dr.  Robert  Hutch- 
inson,  in  Food  and  the  Principles  of  Dietetics,  we  find: 

The  unripe  banana  is  dried  and  used  to  produce  banana  flour  or  meal. 
A  sample  of  such  a  flour  had  the  following  percentage  composition : 

Carbo-  Mineral 

Moisture      Proteid  Fat  hydrates  matter 

Banana  flour       13.0  4.0  0.5  80.0  2.5 

Wheat  flour        13.8  7.9  1.4  76.4  0.5* 

The  banana  is  particularly  valuable  for  giving  us  a  large 
amount  of  needed  mineral  salts.  In  this  respect  it  exceeds  the 
much-praised  onion.  It  is  apparent  that  most  people  in  the 
temperate  zones  do  not  know  stages  of  ripeness  at  which  ha- 

*Prescott,  Dr.  S.  C.:  "The  Banana:  A  Food  of  Exceptional  Value," 
The  Scientific  Monthly,  January,  1918. 


COOKING  BANANAS  171 

nanas  should  be  eaten.  For  cooking  they  should  be  taken  a 
little  green,  before  the  starch  is  turned  to  sugar.  They  are  not 
ripe  enough  to  eat  until  the  skin  shows  black  spots,  when  the 
starch  is  much  more  easily  digestible  than  the  cereal  starches 
to  which  we 'are  accustomed. 

The  commercial  banana  supply  of  the  present  is  derived  from 
the  mere  fringe  of  the  banana  territory.  On  the  coast  of  Guiana 
or  the  Amazon  Valley  the  banana  acreage  could  be  multiplied 
many  fold ;  and,  if  we  should  extensively  adopt  the  use  of  banana 
flour,  bananas  produced  in  remote  valleys  of  the  East  Indies  or 
Central  Africa  might  be  brought  to  us  in  imperishable  form  in 
quantities  beyond  the  apparent  need  for  many  generations. 

DRIED  STARCH 

Most  of  our  starchy  food  is  taken  in  combination  with  the 
other  parts  of  the  plant  that  produce  it,  but  sometimes  we 
separate  it  from  the  plant  in  which  it  grows,  and  utilize  it  in 
purer  forms.  Manufactured  starch  serves  many  uses  among 
civilized  men  and  is  produced  by  similar  methods  from  a  great 
variety  of  starch  plants.  As  starch  can  easily  be  washed  out 
of  finely  divided  pieces  of  the  starch-producing  substance:  a 
plant  is  simply  torn  to  bits,  the  starch  washed  out  in  water, 
and  allowed  to  settle.  After  a  few  washings  the  starch  is  ready 
for  market.  By  this  means  the  starch  is  separated  from  cassava ; 
it  is  then  collected  into  lumps  by  being  slightly  heated,  and  is 
sold  as  tapioca.  This  industry  might  be  carried  on  almost  any- 
where in  the  moist  region  where  the  labor  supply  is  sufficient 
for  the  work.  The  chief  supply  comes  from  the  Straits  Settle- 
ments of  the  Malay  Peninsula  and  is  for  the  most  part  produced 
by  Chinese  workmen  living  under  the  British  rule.  Brazil,  with 
a  large  population  of  negroes  and  Portuguese  in  and  near  the 
coast  cities,  is  another  important  tapioca  producer. 

Starches  from  different  plants  have  differently  shaped  grains 
and  serve  different  purposes.  In  some  of  the  New  England 
States,  New  York,  and  Wisconsin,  much  starch  is  manufactured 
from  potatoes  simply  by  washing  the  potatoes,  grating  them 
into  small  bits  with  rapidly  revolving  machinery,  and  soaking 
out  the  starch.  This  variety  is  used  chiefly  in  sizing;  that  is, 


172  STARCH  FOODS  OF  THE  TROPICS 

in  holding  together  the  fiber  ends  in  the  manufacture  of  textile 
goods. 

Laundry  starch  is  made  from  rice.  A  small  amount  of  starch 
for  use  in  dyeing  textiles  is  made  from  wheat.  The  form  of 
starch  most  commonly  manufactured  in  the  United  States  is  de- 
rived from  corn,  and  there  are  starch  factories  in  many  towns  in 
the  corn-belt  states.  This  corn-starch  is  used  in  American  cook- 
ery, more  especially  as  the  raw  material  for  the  manufacture  of 
glucose,  as  mentioned  in  the  chapter  on  corn. 

In  the  Far  Eastern  tropics  a  form  of  starch  is  produced  from 
the  sago  palm  tree  and  extensively  used  as  a  local  food  in  Java, 
Borneo,  Celebes,  and  adjacent  islands.  When  a  sago  palm  tree 
is  about  fifteen  years  old  it  blossoms  profusely  and  produces 
a  large  amount  of  fruit.  Before  the  blossoming,  all  the  material 
for  the  production  of  this  fruit,  the  accumulation  of  years,  is 
stored  in  the  trunk  of  the  tree  in  the  form  of  starch.  To  get 
this  hoard,  the  Malays,  just  before  the  tree  blossoms,  chop  it 
into  pieces  two  or  three  feet  long,  soak  out  the  starch,  dry  it, 
and  make  it  into  flour  for  cakes,  or  into  the  "pearled"  rounded 
masses  which  are  bought  in  grocery  stores  as  sago. 

FUTURE   SUPPLY   OF   CARBOHYDRATES 

When  we  consider  the  wide  variety  of  climates  and  soils,  and 
of  plants  yielding  carbohydrates — bread  and  bread  substitutes — 
wheat,  barley,  rye,  oats,  buckwheat,  corn,  sorghum,  millet,  potato, 
sweet  potato,  yam,  dasheen,  cassava,  banana,  the  palm,  and 
others  not  mentioned  here,  the  fear  that  we  shall  lack  bread 
seems  unnecessary.  When  we  think  of  this  list  and  of  the  added 
fact  that  the  tropic  resources  are  scarcely  touched  by  modern 
scientific  enterprise,  it  is  plain  that  there  is  no  scarcity  of  starch 
foods  in  sight. 

In  the  main  the  supply  of  these  foods  of  the  tropic  world 
have  been  little  influenced  by  the  Great  War  except  that  they, 
like  our  own  breadstuffs,  were  cut  off  by  ship  shortage.  This 
same  ship  shortage  also  cut  off  some  of  the  importation  of  bread- 
stuffs  to  the  tropics,  and  thereby  made  it  necessary  to  increase 
home  production  in  some  cases  to  meet  home  needs. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
MEAT,  MEN,  AND  LAND 

PERHAPS  some  reader  of  this  .book,  seeing  statements  of  the 
great  and  in  some  cases  almost  indefinite  possibilities  of  increase 
in  breadstuffs  and  bread  substitutes,  has  come  to  the  conclusion 
that  the  author  is  an  incorrigible  optimist,  touched  perhaps  with 
unreason.  Let  him  take  comfort  in  the  statement  that  meat  will 
become  more  and  more  scarce.  Furthermore,  it  will  become 
more  scarce  as  the  production  of  these  other  foods  increases. 
We  cannot  have  both  indefinite  increase  of  bread  and  indefi- 
nite increase  of  meat  from  land  animals. 

The  coming  scarcity  of  meat  is  by  no  means  so  great  a  calamity 
as  many  people  think,  for  meat  is  far  less  important  than  bread. 

Meat  is  good;  it  is  very  good.  It  furnishes  protein  and  is  a 
great  muscle-making  food;  but  it  is  not  as  important  as  our 
appetites  make  us  believe,  because  it  is  partly  a  food  and  partly 
a  stimulant.  We  always  like  stimulants  when  once  we  have 
become  used  to  them.  Hundreds  of  millions  of  people  do  not 
eat  any  meat  at  all.  Most  of  these  vegetarians  are  in  India, 
China,  and  Japan,  but  enough  of  them  are  in  every  country  to 
show  that  meat  is  not  an  absolute  necessity,  although  it  is  very 
good  in  itself,  and  is  so  palatable  that  its  use  increases  our  enjoy- 
ment of  other  food. 

Meat  does  two  things:  it  nourishes  and  it  serves  as  an  appe- 
tizer. As  an  appetizer  it  is  like  salt  or  pepper;  we  get  used 
to  it  as  we  do  to  pepper,  coffee,  tobacco,  or  alcohol,  and  then 
we  dislike  to  abandon  it,  although  we  may  taper  off  and  use  much 
less.  We  do  not  need  the  bacon  with  the  eggs,  but  it  makes 
them  taste  fine.  So  does  salt,  yet  the  salt  has  no  food  value  to 
us.  All  the  salt  in  our  blood  comes  from  the  bodies  of  animals 
and  plants  that  make  our  meat  or  vegetable  food.  Yet  without 
the  mineral  salt  as  an  appetizer  the  meal  would  seem  almost 
inedible.  People  who  do  not  eat  meat  use  other  flavoring, 

173 


174  MEAT,  MEN,  AND  LAND 

pepper  and  other  spices,  to  season  their  food.  Pickles  and 
sauces  serve  the  same  purpose.  The  Japanese  make  very  skilful 
use  of  meat  and  fish  as  appetizers,  so  that  their  meal  may  con- 
sist chiefly  of  rice  (energy  food)  and  beans  (muscle  food),  with 
a  little  fish  for  flavoring. 

The  Orientals  also  use  soy  bean  sauce,  in  some  localities,  ten 
quarts  per  adult  person  per  year.  It  is  made  of  soy  beans  and 
wheat,  and  a  tablespoonful  or  so  is  used  at  a  meal.  Like  good 
beef  gravy,  it  makes  potatoes  or  rice  satisfying. 

The  skilful  cook  in  America  who  is  trying  to  save  meat  or 
to  cut  down  the  cost  of  living  can  greatly  reduce  the  meat  con- 
sumption if  once  he  recognizes  the  fact  that  meat  is  an  appe- 
tizer. A  dish  of  soup  gets  the  flavoring  of  meat  from  scraps 
and  bones,  and,  thickened  with  potato  flour,  it  may  be  as  nutri- 
tious and  satisfying  as  wheat  bread  or  meat  itself.  In  Europe 
today  all  left-over  food  goes  into  soup  to  make  it  appetizing. 
It  is  also  true  that  a  small  amount  of  salt  meat  satisfies  just  as 
well  as  a  larger  amount  of  less  highly  flavored  fresh  meat.  Con- 
vincing demonstration  may  be  had  by  mixing  a  small  amount 
of  thinly  sliced,  finely  cut  dried  salt  beef  with  scrambled  eggs. 
Because  of  its  flavor  value  a  pound  of  salted  ham  goes  further 
than  two  pounds  of  chicken,  and  a  pound  of  bacon  goes  as  far 
as  three  pounds  of  beefsteak.* 

Another  reason  why  meat  is  used  by  those  who  can  afford 
it  is  its  aid  in  concealing  poor  cooking.  The  savoriness  of  meat 
enables  a  poor  cook  to  make  a  passable  meal  when  without  meat 
the  results  would  be  almost  inedible.  Any  one  eating  at  restau- 
rants in  the  United  States  is  likely  to  observe  how  hard  it  is  to 
order  a  suitable  meal  without  taking  meat  to  make  the  flavorless 

*  "The  flavor  of  meat  is  such  that  it  lends  itself  to  the  easy  y>reparation 
of  a  palatable  meal,  but  this  flavor  could  undoubtedly  be  as  well  obtained 
if  the  present  consumption  of  meat  were  cut  in  two.  It  is  a  question  of 
habit,  but  with  the  present  reduced  supply  of  meat  one  must  adopt  new 
habits.  It  would  be  highly  desirable  if  the  grain  now  fed  to  fatten  beef 
were  given  to  maintain  herds  of  milch  cows. 

"  Indulgence  in  meat  is  due  to  the  desire  for  strong  flavor.  With  the 
increased  distribution  of  wealth,  the  demand  for  meat  grows.  Its  con- 
sumption by  all  classes  had  vastly  increased  in  all  prosperous  countries 
prior  to  the  war.  It  is  well,  however,  to  remember  that  its  use  has  been 
excessive  and  unnecessary,  and  its  price  can  be  cut  by  wholesale  voluntary 
abstinence  The  British  people  have  suffered  no  hardship  in  the  recent 
reduction  of  their  meat  ration." — Lusk,  Graham:  Food  in  War  Time, 
pp.  18-19. 


THE  FOOD  OF  NATIONS 


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176 

and  almost  spoiled  vegetables  go  down.*    Good  cooks  can  easily 
use  less  meat,  as  this  table  of  comparative  values  .shows : 

CALORIES  PER  OUNCE 

Protein  Fat  Carbohydrate         Total 

Lean  beef                     40.9  4.54  0                   45.6 

Potato                             2.6  3.  21.5                27.1 

Milk.                               3.8  11.  5.8                20.6 

Peanut  kernels             29.2  99.2  27.6  156. 

Cheese                           32.0  95.  4.  131. 

Walnut  kernels            19.4  169.4  18.2  206.8 

Dried  lima  beans         21.1  4.  76.9  102. 

Oatmeal                        18.8  19.2  78.8  116.8 

Among  most  peoples  of  the  world  meat  is  becoming  more  and 
more  a  luxury.  Some  are  even  forbidden  by  their  religion  to 
eat  flesh.  An  examination  of  the  above  table  of  food  values 
shows  the  sufficiency  of  vegetable  foods,  a  fortunate  fact  for  the 
many  millions  of  the  human  race  in  Asia  and  Europe  who  are 
so  poor  that  they  can  rarely  afford  to  eat  meat.  It  is  a  luxury 
used  chiefly  in  lands  where  the  sparse  population  makes  meat 
cheap.  In  such  countries  man  always  has  the  choice  of  eating 
plant  products  directly  or,  since  land  is  cheap  and  plant  prod- 
ucts abundant,  of  feeding  them  to  animals  and  then  eating  the 
animals.  The  latter  course  is  much  the  more  expensive,  for  the 
making  of  a  pound  of  meat  requires  the  grass  from  much  land, 
or  five  to  ten  pounds  of  grain,  the  equivalent  of  eight  to  fifteen 
one-pound  loaves  of  bread.  When  men  are  hungry  enough, 
they  prefer  seven  pounds  of  corn  meal  to  one  pound  of  dressed 

*"I  predict  that  there  is  going  to  be  an  era  of  better  cooking  in 
America  after  this  war.  Our  soldiers,  returning  home,  are  going  to 
demand  a  tastier  and  more  diversified  fare,  than  many  of  them  enjoyed 
before  they  put  on  khaki  and  went  overseas;  and  they  are  going  to  get 
it  too.  Remembering  what  they  had  to  eat  under  French  roofs,  they 
will  never  again  be  satisfied  with  meats  fried  to  death,  soggy  vegetables, 
with  underdone  breads.  For  all  we  knew — or  cared — the  meat  she  put 
into  her  pot  might  have  been  horse  meat  and  the  garnishments  such 
green  things  as  she  had  plucked  at  the  roadside;  but  the  flavor  of  the 
delectable  broth  cured  us  of  any  inclinations  to  make  investigation  as  to 
the  former  stations  in  life  of  its  basic  constituents.  I  am  satisfied  that, 
chosen  at  random,  almost  any  peasant  housewife  of  France  can  take  an 
old  Palm  Beach  suit  and  a  handful  of  potherbs  and  mingling  these  to- 
gether according  to  her  own  peculiar  system,  turn  out  a  ragout  fit  for 
a  king.  Indeed,  it  would  be  far  too  good  for  some  kings  I  know  of." — 
Irvin  S.  Cobb  in  Saturday  Evening  Post. 


BEASTS,  FIRST  OBJECT  OF  OUR  AGRICULTURE     177 

pork.  In  densely  peopled  regions,  where  there  is  not  food  enough 
for  both  man  and  beast,  man  eats  the  food  and  does  without  the 
beast. 

In  the  United  States  and  Canada,  but  especially  in  the  United 
States,  the  chief  object  of  agriculture  is  not  to  feed  men,  but 


LEADING  COUNTRIES 


CROPPED  LAND 
MILLIONS    OF  ACRES 


LAND  IN  CROPS 
%  OF    LAND   AREA 


ACRES  IN  CROPS 

PER  CAPITA 
OF  TOTAL  POPULATION 


CHINA 

INO4A   ._____„„„. 

WJW1A    (CU»O*CAM)._ 
UNITED     STATES....... 

OCNMAN     EMPIRE     ..... 


FIG.  60. — One  of  the  good  measures  of  national  wealth. 
(Finch  and  Baker.) 

to  feed  beasts.  This  was  true  even  in  the  food  crisis  of  1918. 
We  now  raise  altogether  about  5,191  million  bushels  of  grain, 
as  follows: 

1916-17  Average 

Corn  2,863  million  bu. 

Wheat  643       "  " 

Oats  1,422       "  " 

Rye  54       "  " 

Barley  195       "  " 

Buckwheal  14       "  " 


5,191 

Of  this  great  total  the  American  people  ate  less  than  550  mil- 
lion bushels  of  wheat  when  unrestricted,  180  million  bushels 
of  other  grains,  and  the  total  export  of  grains,  341  million, 
brought  the  amount  used  for  human  food  up  to  about  900  mil- 
lion. The  rest,  4,300  million,  went  to  our  four-footed  brethren, 
who  outnumber  us  and  whose  food  requirements,  because  of  their 
greater  size,  are  several  times  our  own. 

In  addition  to  the  grain,  they  get  all  of  the  85,360,000  tons 
of  hay  grown  on  54,618,500  acres.  They  also  roam  over  mil- 
lions of  acres,  eating  all  the  grass.  It  is  therefore  plain  that 
more  than  four-fifths  of  the  produce  of  American  agriculture, 
even  in  1918,  went  to  feed  the  beasts.  This  condition  is  an  indi- 


178  MEAT,  MEN,  AND  LAND 

cation  of  the  riches  of  the  people  of  the  United  States,  a  people 
relatively  few  in  number  in  a  land  of  unparalleled  natural  re- 
sources. We  can  best  appreciate  the  poverty  of  some  Oriental 
peoples  by  noting  the  small  number  of  domestic  animals  which 
they  are  able  to  support.  (See  table,  Food  of  Nations,  p.  175.) 

RELATION   OF  MEAT   ANIMALS  TO  DENSITY   OF   POPULATION 

Japan  probably  presents  the  most  extreme  example  of  a  peo- 
ple who  maintain  a  high  civilization  with  few  animals.  With 
the  exception  of  the  northern  island  of  Hokkaido,  the  whole 
country  has  a  population  of  from  400  to  500  people  per  square 
mile ;  and  the  rough  and  steep  country  permits  only  a  sixth  of 
the  land  to  be  cultivated.  Room  for  pasture  does  not  exist,  be- 
cause of  a  "dense  growth  of  bamboo  grass  wholly  unfit  for  food 
and  impossible  to  eradicate."  The  effect  of  this  absence  of  pas- 
ture and  pressure  of  population  in  limiting  the  production  of 
domestic  animals  is  marked.  The  empire  has  nearly  fifty  mil- 
lions of  people,  and  of  horses  and  cattle  combined  but  S1/-*  per 
cent,  of  that  number,  while  the  number  of  sheep  and  hogs  is 
but  5/8  of  one  per  cent,  of  the  number  of  people.  These  num- 
bers are  utterly  insignificant  in  comparison  with  those  of  the 
United  States  (95  and  156  per  cent,  respectively,  1913),  or  even 
with  those  of  Europe.  It  is  needless  to  say  that  nearly  all  of 
these  people  are  vegetarians,  except  for  fish.  In  the  graphic- 
words  of  Professor  George  T.  Warren,  of  Cornell,  "In  Japan, 
the  man  is  a  beast  of  burden,  and  lives  on  hay." 

Denmark  is  an  agricultural  country  where  some  meat  is  eaten 
and  animal  products  are  an  important  factor  in  commerce.  This 
country  (74  per  cent,  fields  and  pastures)  has  four  or  five  times 
as  much  of  its  area  suitable  for  farms  as  has  Japan ;  Denmark 
has  passed  the  limit  of  the  number  of  animals  it  can  support  on 
native  food;  cattle  foods  such  as  wheat  bran,  cottonseed  meal, 
linseed  oil  cake,  and  other  grain  products  have  been  imported 
in  large  and  increasing  quantities  from  the  United  States,  Argen- 
tina, and  Russia.  When  the  United  States  entered  the  war  and 
began  to  help  England  starve  out  Germany,  cattle  food  supplies 
were  cut  off  from  Danish  and  other  neutral  European  countries. 
Slaughtering  of  cattle  and  a  great  decline  in  the  number  of  cat- 


IOWA  AND  DENMARK  COMPARED 


179 


tie  almost  immediately  followed.  Before  the  war  the  Danish 
population  was  167  to  the  square  mile,  and  there  were  ninety 
per  cent,  of  that  number  horses  and  cattle,  while  the  number  of 
sheep  and  swine  reached  about  the  same  percentage.  The  state 
of  Iowa,  practically  all  arable,  a  strictly  agricultural  state  in 


FIG.  61. — Italian  woman  carrying  fresh  grass  from  Geld  to  farm  animals- 
a  common  scene  in  densely  peopled  lands. 


the  midst  of  the  corn-belt,  is  far  better  fitted  than  Denmark  to 
support  livestock;  but  it  had  fewer  per  square  mile  (1913)  than 
Denmark,  with  but  forty  persons  to  the  square  mile;  the  ratio 
of  horses  and  cattle  to  this  population  was  257  per  cent,  and 
the  ratio  of  sheep  and  swine  to  the  population  was  475  per 
cent. 

Holland  and  Great  Britain  arc  countries  whose  density  of 
population  has  carried  them  beyond  the  condition  of  Denmark 


180  MEAT,  MEN,  AND  LAND 

over  toward  the  condition  of  Japan.  The  population  is  550  to 
the  square  mile  in  England  and  Wales,  150  in  Scotland,  and 
136  in  Ireland.  There  were,  before  the  war,  31  per  cent,  of  that 
number  of  cattle  and  horses,  and  74  per  cent,  of  that  number  of 
sheep  and  hogs.  Ireland,  with  a  relatively  sparse  population 
for  western  Europe,  exported  a  rather  large  amount  of  meat  to 
England;  the  ratio  of  horses  and  cattle  to  population  was  132 
per  cent.,  and  of  sheep  and  swine,  107  per  cent.,  thereby  also 
far  exceeding  Iowa  in  actual  numbers  per  square  mile.  Yet 
the  people  of  the  United  Kingdom  are  the  greatest  meat-import- 
ing nation  of  the  world,  because  they  can  afford  to  be. 

On  each  square  mile  of  the  fertile  and  well-tilled  Holland 
land  there  were,  before  the  war,  504  people,  with  cattle  and 
horses  39.6  per  cent,  as  numerous,  and  the  sheep  and  swine  but 
32.5  per  cent.  One  of  the  spectacular  sights  of  the  war  was  a 
string  of  Dutch  steamers  that  lay  in  New  York  harbor  from 
January  to  July,  1917,  rocking  at  anchor,  loaded  to  the  water 
line  with  50,000  tons  of  wheat,  bran,  and  cottonseed  meal,  wait- 
ing permission  to  sail;  this  was  finally  denied  them,  and  the 
Dutch  cattle  went  to  the  butcher's  block  and  the  cow  feed  to 
the  New  England  dairy  farms.  Before  the  war,  meat  was 
imported  into  Holland,  although  the  Dutchman  eats  less  meat 
on  the  average  than  does  the  Englishman.  Intensify  agricul- 
ture as  we  may,  dense  populations  inevitably  find  meat  scarcer 
than  do  sparse  populations,  and  turn  ever  increasingly  to  vege- 
table food. 

MEAT   ANIMALS   IN  SPARSELY   PEOPLED   LANDS 

In  a  country  with  sparse  population,  the  opposite  condition 
prevails — cheap  and  abundant  supplies  of  meat  for  home  use 
and  a  large  surplus  for  export.  In  the  United  States  the 
average  population  is  about  thirty  to  the  square  mile ;  the  num- 
ber of  cattle  and  horses  is  89  per  cent,  of  the  population  (1917, 
also  1913),  the  number  of  sheep  and  hogs  115  per  cent.,  1917 
(125  per  cent.  1913).  The  high  ratio  of  animals  to  men  has 
made  the  United  States  a  great  exporter  of  meat  products,  but 
the  countries  to  which  we  send  meat  exceed  us  in  the  number 
of  animals  per  square  mile.  In  the  United  States  there  are  on 


DECLINING  MEAT  SUPPLY  181 

'the  average  about  thirty-five  cattle  and  horses  per  square  mile. 
In  Great  Britain  and  Ireland  there  normally  are  (1913)  116, 
and  in  Denmark  and  Holland  194  per  square  mile. 

The  decline  in  the  ratio  of  meat  animals  to  man  in  the  United 
States,  as  shown  by  the  table  below,  is  rapidly  raising  the 
price  of  meat  and  has,  according  to  some  estimates,  cut  in  half 
the  per  capita  meat  consumption  in  the  United  States  since 
1840.  Most  of  the  increase  in  price  has  occurred  since  1901. 
In  the  next  eleven  years  the  United  States  lost  nearly  one- 
third  of  her  per  capita  supply  of  cattle,  two-fifths  of  her  per 
capita  supply  of  sheep,  and  one-fourteenth  of  her  per  capita 
supply  of  swine.  The  figures  do  not  show  the  facts  of  meat 
shortage  with  perfect  accuracy,  because  the  average  size  of  the 
slaughtered  hog  has  declined  and  there  has  been  absolute  increase 
in  the  number  of  milch  cows  at  the  expense  of  beef  cattle.  So 
rapid  has  been  the  change  in  the  American  meat  supply  that 
importation  of  meat,  more  than  200.000,000  pounds  a  year  of 
beef,  largely  from  Argentina,  had  been  established,  when  sud- 
denly the  war,  with  its  increased  demand  for  meat,  caused  us 
again  to  export  it  in  large  quantities.  This  export  from  an 
already  reduced  supply  sent  American  meat  prices  to  the  aston- 
ishing figures  of  1918.  In  a  short  time  dressed  pork  that  had 
sold  for  8  to  10  cents  a  pound  (whole  carcass)  sold  for  20  to  24 
cents,  and  other  prices  rose  proportionately. 


POPULATION  AND  ANIMALS  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES, 

1870-1917 

Cattle    Per  cent.  Per  cent.  Horses    Per  cent.  Per  cent. 

of  all    of  popu-  of  popu.       and       ofpopu-  of  popn- 

Popu-  kinds    lation  of      Hogs       lation       mules       latlon      Sheep     lation  of 


millions 

1.000 

i     K  i  1  1  1  1 

States 

1,000 

'1      LJULU 

States 

1,000 

States      1,000         State 

1870 

38.6 

25,483 

66 

26,751 

69 

9,427 

25 

40,853 

106 

1880 

50.2 

33,258 

66 

34,034 

68 

12,930 

25 

40,765 

80 

1890 

62.9 

52,801 

83 

51,602 

82 

16,544 

26 

44,336 

67 

1001 

77 

62,333 

80 

56,982 

75 

19,648 

25 

59,756 

77 

1012 

93 

57,959 

62 

65,410 

70 

24,871 

27 

52,362 

56 

inn 

100 

63,617 

63 

67,453 

67 

25,765 

25 

48,483 

48 

The  Southern  Hemisphere,  with  its  newer  and  sparser  settle- 
ments, furnishes  the  most  striking  examples  of  animal  abun- 
dance. Argentina  is  half  as  large  as  the  United  States,  but  the 


182 


MEAT,  MEN,  AND  LAND 


FOOD  PER  ACRE  OF  VARIOUS  CROPS 

A  comparison  of  the  food  produced  annually  by  an  acre  of  land  ichen 
utilised  in  the  production  of  various  food  crops  and  live-stock  products. — 
All  but  last  column  from  Farmer's  Bulletin  877,  U.  S.  D.  A. 


Kood    products 

Yield  per  acre 

Calories 
per  pound 

Pounds 
protein 
per  acre 

(digestible) 

Calorics 
per  acre 

Percentage 
of  Food 
Value  in 
comparison 
to  Corn 

Itus'icls 

Pounds 

Food  crops: 
Corn 

35 

1,060 
1  5,040 
6,000 
1,200 
1,200 
1,154 
1,086 
060 
524 
^784 
840 
600 
'600 

1,504 
480 
318 
1,506 
1,400 
1,460 
1,456 
1,508 
2,416 
1,600 
1  ,337 
1,421 
1  ,252 

147.0 
53.5 
66.0 
118.8 
110.4 
55.4 
50.0 
204.7 
126.2 
80.4 
157.0 
116.4 
34  5 

3,124,240 
2,851,200 
1,008,000 
1,807,200 
1,788,000 
1,684,840 
1,581,216 
1,534,000 
1.265,018 
1  254,400 
1,123,080 
P52.600 
751,800 

100.0 
01.0 
61.0 
57.5 
57.1 
54.0 
50.5 
40.0 
40.5 
40.0 
36.0 
27.0 
24.0 

Sweet  potatoes  .... 
Irish  potatoes  

110 

100 
20 
20 
40 

Rye  

Wheat    

Rice,  unpolished  .  . 
Rice,  polished  .  . 

Sov  beans   

16 
.'54 
3J5 

Peanuts   

Oats 

Beans  

14 
10 
24 

Cowpeas    

Buckwheat    

Dairy  products: 
Milk 

2,100 
210 
08.55 

325 
1,050 
3,605 

2,465 
1,215 
1,040 

1,045 
720 

723 

56.7 
1.0 

22.7 
14.7 
18.5 

711,750 
427,050 
355,273 

672,045 
137,205 
130,000 

22.8 
13.6 
11.5 

21.5 
4.3 
4.1 

Cheese                .... 

Butterfat 

Meat  : 
Pork  

Live' 
(pounds) 

350 
205 
216 

103 

Dressed 
(pounds) 

273 
113 

125 

66 

Mutton     

Beef    

Poultry:  * 
Meat    

12.7 
14.S 

68,970 
70,704 

2.2 

2.5 

Etres 

Dozen 
73.8 

Pounds 

110.7 

Total    

27.5 

33.0 
124.6 

148,67  1 

178,60,") 
1:52,102 

4.7 

5.7 
4.2 

For  poultry  meat  alone 
For  eggs  alone  


1,045 
720 

Live 
(pounds) 

267 

Dressed 
(pounds) 

171 

Dozen 

122.4 

Pounds 

183.6 

Notes  on  opposite  page. 


ANIMALS  IN  THE  SOUTHERN  HEMISPHERE       183 

population,  less  than  that  of  New  York  or  Pennsylvania, 
averages  only  6.9  people  per  square  mile,  and  only  18.2  per 
square  mile  in  the  best  agricultural  province.  The  number  of 
animals  is  astonishingly  large  in  comparison  with  the  number 
in  Japan,  Europe,  or  even  the  United  States.  The  ratio  of  cattle 
and  horses  to  population  is  500  per  cent.  (1912),  and  of  sheep 
and  swine  combined  1,000  per  cent.  The  guacho,  or  Argentina 
cowboy,  has  as  his  ration  five  pounds  of  beef  or  mutton  per. day, 
and  he  eats  little  or  nothing  else.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that 
travelers  returning  from  journeys  in  the  desert  of  Mongolia 
report  that  this  also  is  the  ration  and  diet  of  their  Mongol 
caravan  drivers  in  that  land  where  agriculture  is  impossible 
and  pasturing  the  only  industry. 

Australia  shows  conditions  similar  to  those  of  Argentina.  The 
continent  has  nearly  three  million  square  miles,  and  while  much 
of  it  is  a  desert,  there  are  large  areas  suitable  for  keeping  ani- 
mals. The  sparse  population  of  about  l1/^  per  square  mile  has 
for  each  100  people  304  horses  and  cattle,  and  1,780  sheep  and 
hogs — chiefly  sheep.  These  figures  show  why  meat  and  other 
animal  products  make  up  such  a  large  proportion  of  the  exports 
of  these  sparsely  peopled  countries  of  the  south  temperate  zone. 

The  ratios  of  animals  to  men  demonstrate  the  great  differences 
in  man's  relation  to  the  land  in  the  East  and  the  West,  in  the 
sparsely  and  the  densely  populated  country.  The  American 
farmer  grows  corn  and  feeds  it  to  cattle  and  then  eats  the  cattle ; 
but  one  ox  eats  as  much  as  five  men  *  and  requires  five  times  as 

*  For  example,  the  ox  used  as  the  standard  in  the  table  above  given, 
ate  daily  15.64  pounds  of  corn,  1.66  pounds  cottonseed  meal,  20.5  pounds' 
of  corn  silage,  2.74  pounds  clover  hay,  7.29  pounds  corn  fodder.     On  such 
a  ration  he  gains  on  the  average  about.  2]4  pounds  per  day,  and  of  this 
a  considerable  proportion,  more  than  a  third,  disappears  as  inedibles  or 
waste  in  the  process  of  slaughter. 

1  54  pounds  per  bushel. 

*  Hulled  kernels. 
s  Flour. 

4  The  first  section  under  "  poultry  "  assumes  that  poultry  are  kept  under 
ordinary  poultry-farm  conditions,  the  pullets  being  raised  and  the  old  hens 
and  young  mafes  being  used  for  meat.  What  eggs  are  not  needed  for 
hatching  purposes  are  used  for  food. 

The  data  for  "  poultry  meat  alone "  assume  the  purchase  of  day-old 
chicks,  which  are  grown  to  a  4-pound  weight  and  utilized  as  food. 

The  data  for  "  eggs  alone  "  assume  the  purchase  of  "hens  and  their  utiliza- 
tion for  the  production  of  eggs  alone. 


184 


MEAT,  MEN,  AND  LAND 


much  land  for  his  support.  Consequently  the  numerous  Orientals 
often  omit  the  animal-feeding  stage  and  grow  rice  and  vegetables 
to  eat  rather  than  for  feeding  to  animals.  Room  for  great  in- 
crease in  population  would  result  from  the  adoption  of  an  essen- 
tially vegetable  diet  plus  dairy  products  and  the  raising  of 
animals  only  for  milk  and  work.*  The  ox  that  consumes  as 


FIG.  62. — Flier's  view  of  roads,  villages,  and  the  small  fields  of  north- 
ern France  and  Belgium.     (From  The  Camera  Man.) 

much  as  five  men  lives  at  least  two  years  and  does  not  produce 
more  than  750  pounds  of  meat.  Thus  an  ox  represents  150 
days'  rations  for  the  Argentine  cowboy,  and  3,650  days'  rations 
(ten  years)  for  the  Oriental.  This  difference  illustrates  one  of 
the  many  striking  results  produced  by  difference  in  density  of 
population. 

The  wastefulness  of  meat  production  from  the  standpoint 

*  "  Lacto-vegetarianism  should  not  be  confused  with  strict  vegetarianism. 
The  former  is,  when  the  diet  is  properly  planned,  the  most  highly  satis- 
factory plan  which  can  be  adopted  in  the  nutrition  of  man.  The  latter, 
if  strictly  adhered  to,  is  fraught  with  grave  danger  unless  the  diet  is 
planned  by  one  who  has  extensive  and  exact  knowledge  of  the  special 
properties  of  the  various  foodstuffs  employed." — E.  V.  McCollum  in  The 
Newer  Knowledge  of  Nutrition,  p.  52. 


THE  WASTEFULNESS  OF  MEAT  185 

of  national  resources  is  well  stated  by  Armsby,  probably  the 
foremost  authority  on  animal  nutrition,  who  has  for  weeks  and 
months  kept  oxen,  pigs,  dogs,  and  men  in  his  great  glass  calorim- 
eter so  that  he  could  measure  the  last  calorie  jof  their  processes 
of  nutrition: 

It  may  be  roughly  estimated  that  about  24  per  cent,  of  the  energy 
of  grain  is  recovered  for  human  consumption  in  pork,  about  18  per 
cent,  in  milk  and  only  about  3.5  per  cent,  in  beef  and  mutton.  In 
other  words,  the  farmer  who  feeds  bread  grains  to  his  stock  is  burning 
up  75  to  97  per  cent,  of  them  in  order  to  produce  for  us  a  small 
residue  of  roast  pig,  and  so  is  diminishing  the  total  stock  of  human 
food.  .  .  . 

The  task  of  the  stock  feeder  must  be  to  utilize  through  his  skill  and 
knowledge  the  inedible  products  of  the  farm  and  factory,  such  as  hay, 
corn  stalks,  straw,  bran,  brewers'  and  distillers'  grains,  gluten  feed,  and 
the  like,  and  to  make  at  least  a  fraction  of  them  available  for  man's 
use.  In  so  doing  he  will  be  really  adding  to  the  food-supply  and  will 
be  rendering  a  great  public  service.  Rather  than  seek  to  stimulate 
livestock  husbandry  the  ideal  should  be  to  adjust  it  to  the  limits 
set  by  the  available  supply  of  forage  crops  and  by-product  feeding 
stuffs  while,  on  the  other  hand,  utilizing  these  to  the  greatest  practi- 
cable extent,  because  in  this  way  we  save  some  of  what  would  otherwise 
be  a  total  loss.  .  .  . 

The  hog  is  the  great  competitor  of  man  for  the  higher  grades  of 
food,  and  in  swine  husbandry  as  ordinarily  conducted  we  are  in  danger 
of  paying  too  much  for  our  roast  pig.  Cattle  and  sheep,  on  the  other 
hand,  although  less  efficient  as  converters,  can  utilize  products  which 
man  can  not  use  and  save  some  of  their  potential  value  as  human  food. 
From  this  point  of  view,  as  well  as  on  account  of  the  importance  of 
milk  to  infants  and  invalids,  the  high  economy  of  food  production  by 
the  dairy  cow  deserves  careful  consideration,  although  of  course  the 
large  labor  requirement  is  a  counterbalancing  factor. 

At  any  rate,  it  is  clear  that  at  the  present  time  enthusiastic  but  ill- 
considered  booming  of  livestock  production  may  do  more  harm  than 
good.  If  it  is  desirable  to  restrict  or  prohibit  the  production  of  alcohol 
from  grain  or  potatoes  on  the  ground  that  it  involves  a  waste  of  food 
value,  the  same  reason  calls  for  restriction  of  the  burning-up  of  these 
materials  to  produce  roast  pig.  This  means,  of  course,  a  limited  meat 
supply.  To  some  of  us  this  may  seem  a  hardship.  Meat,  however,  is 
by  no  means  the  essential  that  we  have  been  wont  to  suppose  and 
partial  deprivation  of  it  is  not  inconsistent  with  high  bodily  efficiency. 
Certainly  no  patriotic  citizen  would  wish  to  insist  on  his  customary 
allowance  of  roast  pig  at  the  cost  of  the  food-supply  of  his  brothers 
in  the  trenches.* 

*"  Roast  Pig,"  Science,  1917,  XLVI,  160. 


186  MEAT,  MEN,  AND  LAND 

As  a  way  out  of  the  meat  shortage,  Dr.  Lusk  points  to  the 
importance  of  milk  and  vegetables: 

If  one  takes  milk  with  other  foods,  meat  may  be  dispensed  with. 
Thus  Hindhede  advocates  as  ideal  a  diet  consisting  of  bread,  potatoes, 
fruit,  and  a  pint  of  milk.  Splendid  health,  both  of  body  and  mind, 
the  peasants'  comparative  immunity  to  indigestion,  kidney  and  liver 
disease,  as  well  as  an  absolute  immunity  to  gout,  is  the  alluring  pros- 
pect held  out  by  the  following  dietary : 

Graham  bread 1       pound 

Potatoes  2       pounds 

Vegetable  fat   V-2  pound 

Apples   IVa  pounds 

Milk    1       pint 

This  brcad-potato-fruit  diet  gives  a  very  excellent  basis  of 
wholesome  nutrition.  The  potatoes  yield  an  alkaline  ash,  which 
has  a  highly  solvent  power  over  uric  acid,  and,  therefore,  a  good 
supply  of  these  valuable  tubers  is  needed  by  the  nation.* 

This  meatless  diet  will  doubtless  seem  like  phantasy  to  many 
an  American  working  man  used  to  meat  three  times  a  day,  un- 
aware of  the  force  of  dietary  habits,  and  sure  thai;  his  meat 
makes  his  strength — as  others  have  thought  that  their  alcohol 
made  their  strength.  But  Lusk  goes  on : 

The  well-known  work  of  Chittenden  has  shown  that  when  the  protein 
intake  is  reduced  by  one-half  or  less  of  that  which  the  average  American 
appetite  suggests,  professional  men,  soldiers,  and  athletes  may  be  main- 
tained in  the  best  physical  condition.  One  of  Yale's  champion  inter- 
collegiate athletes  won  all  the  events  of  the  year  in  which  he  was  entered 
while  living  on  a  reduced  protein  or  Chittenden  diet.  Upon  such  a 
diet,  or  less  than  that,  the  people  of  Germany  are  now  living  today. 
The  principle  involves  eating  meat  very  sparingly,  taking  half  a  piece 
where  one  would  have  formerly  been  taken,  and  using  it  only  for  its 
flavor.  The  wing  of  a  chicken  has  little  meat  on  it  and  yet  if  eaten 
together  with  vegetables  it  gives  the  meal  a  different  quality  than  it 
would  have  had  without  it,  and  to  this  extent  its  use  is  warranted. 
The  muscles  are  active  when  hard  labor  is  done,  but  the  muscles  do  not 
need  meat  for  the  performance  of  their  work.  A  fasting  man  may 
have  considerable  power.  The  popular  idea  of  the  necessity  of  meat 
for  a  laboring  man  may  be  epitomized  in  the  statement:  a  strong  man 
can  eat  more  meat  than  a  weak  one,  hence  meat  makes  a  man  strong. 
The  proposition  is  evidently  absurd. 

*  Lusk,  Graham:  Food  in  War  Time,  p.  14. 


MEAT  MAKES  US  HOT  187 

There  is  one  more  thing  about  meat  that  more  people  should 
know  and  act  upon.  Digesting  meat  makes  us  hot.  This  effect 
does  not  indicate  the  heat  value  of  the  food,  for  the  heat  is  not 
energy  available  for  work.  The  process  just  makes  us  hot  as 
a  fire  does.  It  is  better  to  compare  it  to  the  friction  of  a  machine 
that  makes  a  hot  bearing.  The  meat  increases  the  production  of 
heat  in  some  cases  as  much  as  fifty-five  per  cent,  in  a  resting 
man,  and  a  large  proportion  of  the  nutritive  value  of  the  meat 
is  thus  wasted.* 

If  we  work  in  hot  weather  we  must  give  off  the  heat  of  labor, 
and  the  extra  heat  of  digesting  any  meat  we  have  recently 
oaten.  The  lesson  for  daily  life  is  plain;  at  least  we  can  select 
the  time  of  day  to  eat  our  meat.  I  have  personally  tried  it  in 
the  appalling  heat  of  July,  1918,  in  Washington,  D.  C.,  and  it 
worked — /  think,  but  this  is  not  evidence.  I  have  no  measure. 

*  "  About  forty  por  cent  of  the  energy  content  of  protein  is  not  available 
for  the  maintenance  of  lli<>  life  of  tbe  cell  on  account  of  ihis  extra  heat 
production  which  is  induced  by  the  products  of  protein  metabolism  " — Dr. 
Graham  Lusk,  letter,  July  10,  1918.  Dr.  Lusk  calls  this  the  "specific 
dynamic  heat "  of  meat. 


CHAPTER  IX 

FORAGE  AND  DRAFT  ANIMALS— THE  BASIS  OF  WEST- 
ERN CIVILIZATION  AND   FOOD  SUPPLY 

CIVILIZED  mankind  is  largely  dependent  upon  domestic  animals 
for  both  food  and  clothing.  It  may  even  be  said  that  the  for- 
mation of  a  highly  organized  society  is  almost  impossible  with- 
out their  aid.  Domestic  animals  do  five  great  things  for  us:  (1) 
they  work — plow  our  ground,  till  our  crops,  bear  our  burdens; 
(2)  they  give  us  milk,  without  which  so  many  of  us  would  perish 
in  infancy;  (3)  they  give  us  meat,  less  vital  to  our  welfare  than 
milk,  but  more  generally  prized;  (4)  they  give  us  leather;  (5) 
they  give  us  wool.  The  American  Indian,  really  an  intelligent 
and  capable  person,  probably  failed  to  build  cities  to  match 
Rome,  Paris  or  London,  five  hundred  years  ago,  chiefly  because 
he  lacked  suitable  domestic  animals  to  work  with  him,  and  supply 
him  with  necessary  capital.  If  Europe  and  America  were  sud- 
denly bereft  of  domestic  animals  the  whole  structure  of  society 
would  be  changed  and  men  in  large  numbers  would  probably 
perish  from  starvation.  Even  India,  so  largely  vegetarian,  has 
many  millions  of  work  animals.  It  is  evident,  therefore,  that 
the  food  supply  of  our  animals  is  bound  up  with  our  own  supply. 
The  food  (forage)  of  domestic  animals  may  be  divided  into 
two  classes:  (1)  grain,  in  which  we  may  be  said  to  share  our 
food  with  the  animals,  in  that  they  eat  food  we  may  eat;  (2) 
roughage  or  coarse  forage,  which  man  cannot  eat.  This  classi- 
fication suggests  an  interesting  division  of  agriculture  into  the 
production  of  food  for  men  and  food  for  beasts.  In  America 
and  western  Europe  no  such  sharp  line  is  drawn,  but  some  day 
it  may  be.  I  was  first  brought  to  see  this  point  by  the  native 
manager  of  an  English-owned  estate  in  Portugal.  Joao  was 
showing  me  around  the  place,  worked  by  the  slow  and  inefficient 
oxen.  Several  times  I  raised  the  question  why  he  did  not  get 
rid  of  the  oxen  and  use  the  more  active  mule.  Finally  the  ex- 

188 


GRAIN  FORAGE  AND  GRAIN  FOOD  189 

planation  came.  "It  is  this  way,  sefior.  The  mule  eats  grain, 
so  do  people.  The  ox  lives  on  hay  and  straw,  which  people  do 
not  eat,  and  then  we  eat  the  ox  and  we  do  not  eat  the  mule. ' '  He 
was  right.  In  a  land  where  farm  laborers  were  getting  thirty 
to  fifty  cents  a  day  (American  gold),  and  where,  because  of  a 
vicious  tariff  system,  everything  was  twice  as  expensive  as  in  the 
United  States  before  the  war,  and  men  lived  almost  entirely  on 
corn  bread  and  cabbage,  with  a  modicum  of  olive  oil,  it  was 
plain  that  they  had  to  use  the  animal  that  does  not  eat  man's 
food. 

In  America  most  of  the  animals  eat  large  quantities  of  grain 
good  for  human  food.  As  the  population  of  the  world  increases 
agriculture  must  work  more  and  more  toward  the  production  of 
grain  and  meat,  and  our  animal  industry  must  be  devoted  more 
and  more  to  the  animals  which  do  not  eat  our  food.  The  Bedouin 
of  the  desert's  edge,  following  flocks  and  herds  as  did  Job  and 
Jacob,  has  this  kind  of  an  animal  industry.  His  flocks  now, 
as  in  Moses'  time,  are  chiefly  of  sheep,  goats,  camels,  donkeys, 
and  cattle,  usually  very  few  of  the  last.  All  of  these  animals  live 
on  the  herbage  of  the  semi-arid  land.  What  little  gr*ain  there  is 
comes  by  hard  labor  and  is  eaten  by  man.  In  the  time  of  famine, 
the  sons  of  Jacob  rode  far  to  the  great  oasis  at  the  mouth  of  the 
Nile  for  a  few  sacks  of  breadstuff. 

RELATION    OF   HAY    TO    THE    ANIMAL    INDUSTRIES 

"All  flesh  is  grass,"  says  an  Old  Testament  writer.  This  is 
the  slightly  figurative  statement  of  a  man  who  did  not  know 
Indian  corn,  nor  the  silo,  but  it  was  literally  true  for  his 
land,  as  grass  is  a  natural  food  for  most  of  our  domesticated 
quadrupeds.  Pastures  or  grass  fields  where  animals  can  feed 
in  summer  are  the  commonest  feature  of  American  farms;  and 
they  are  found  in  every  European  country  because  there  is 
some  land  too  stony,  too  broken  and  steep,  or  too  wet  for 
tillage.  This  is  pasture  where  the  flocks  gather  the  grass — 
the  least  efficient  of  all  our  crops.  Hay,  the  dry  product  of  the 
pasture,  kept  in  barns  or  stacks  for  winter  use,  is  almost 
equally  common.  In  the  harvesting  of  this  crop  we  see  one 
of  the  direct  results  of  the  climate  that  allows  only  intermit- 


190         THE  BASTS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

tent  growth.  It  is  not  necessary  to  make  hay  in  lands  where 
grass  will  grow  the  year  round,  as  it  does  in  many  parts  of  the 
torrid  zone  and  in  a  few  localities  of  the  temperate  zone. 

Hay  is  usually  a  supply  crop,  to  be  eaten  by  the  animals  of 
the  farm  and  either  used  or  sold  in  the  form  of  work,  meat, 
butter,  cheese,  milk,  wool,  or  hides.  Practically  all  of  the  pas- 
turing animals  except  the  reindeer  can  get  along  well  on  hay. 
It  is  relished  at  the  zoo  alike  by  the  elephant  whose  native  food 
was  the  fresh  green  of  the  tropical  jungle,  and  by  the  camel  who 
at  home  contented  himself  with  the  bushes,  the  harsh  grasses,  and 
the  young  thorns  of  the  desert.  The  deer  and  the  moose  also  like 
it,  although  in  their  native  homes  they  nourish  themselves  in 
winter  almost  entirely  upon  the  twigs  and  branches  of  bushes 
which  project  above  the  snow,  and  such  forage  as  they  can 
get  by  digging  in  the  snow. 

HAY   AND    CITY   DWELLERS 

It  may  seem  that  this  supply  crop  of  the  farm  is  of  little  value 
to  city  dwellers,  and  not  part  of  a  discussion  of  our  own  food 
supply,  but  nearly  all  city  people  are  indirectly  dependent  upon 
hay.  Every  time  one  eats  beef,  mutton,  butter,  milk,  or  cheese,  he 
uses  a  commodity  that  could  scarcely  have  been  produced  in  com- 
mercial quantities  without  hay;  and  when  there  is  a  shortage  in 
hay,  dairy  products  and  meat  are  high  in  price.  Bread  also  is 
usually  the  product  of  the  labor  of  hay-fed  beasts  of  burden,  and 
though  the  motor  truck  is  displacing  the  horse  in  the  city  de- 
livery business,  it  remains  true  that  most  of  the  world's  food 
products  are  still  hauled  to  the  railroad  station  by  a  team  of 
quadrupeds,  like  those  which  helped  produce  them. 

NATURAL  HAY 

In  the  semi-arid  regions,  like  the  Great  Plains  of  the  central 
part  of  North  America,  from  Alberta  to  Texas,  nature  herself 
makes  good  hay.  Here  the  rain  comes  in  the  early  summer,  mak- 
ing the  grass  grow  rapidly.  With  the  increasing  dryness  of  late 
summer,  the  grass  dries  and  stands,  rich  and  nutritious,  for 
months.  The  best  kind  of  American  grass  for  natural  hay  is 


WILD  HAY 


191 


the  so-called  "buffalo  grass,"  which  for  uncounted  centuries  fur- 
nished an  important  part  of  the  food  of  the  vast  herds  of  buf- 
faloes, antelopes,  and  other  wild  animals  of  the  trans-Mississippi 
region.  This  natural  hay,  the  product  of  a  typical  climate,  is  also 
found  in  other  semi-arid  regions :  Argentina,  Australia,  Siberia, 


FIG.  (»3. — By  the  use  of  these  devices  alfalfa  hay  is  cut,  gathered, 
and  thrown  upon  the  rick  without  wagon  or  pitchfork,  or  the  force  of 
human  muscle.  (United  States  Reclamation  Service.) 

Arabia,  and  north  and  south  Africa.  Human  life  depends  on  this 
wild  hay  when  tribes  live  through  the  long  dry  season,  as  do  some 
of  the  Arabs,  by  moving  with  their  flocks  from  place  to  place  in 
search  of  pasture.* 

"This  great  dependence  upon  wild  hay  is  said  to  have  found  expression 
in  law  among  some  tribes.  In  the  dry  season  of  the  year  a  fire  once 
started  in  the  dry  grass  will  destroy  it  for  miles.  The  fire  itself  may 
overtake  flocks  or  camps  and  also  destroy  them.  As  there  can  be  no  more 
pasture  until  months  later  when  the  rains  come  again,  the  person  who 
starts  the  fire  may  thus  bring  starvation  to  herds  of  animate  and  loss  of 
human  life  among  the  people  who  depend  upon  them  As  every  people 
punishes  most  severely  those  offenses  that  tend  to  destroy  society,  death 
is  the  penalty  for  the  Arab  who  starts  a  grass  fire.  No  matter  how 
accidentally  the  disaster  occurred,  no  matter  how  well-meaning  he  may 
have  been,  no  matter  if  he  be  the  son  of  the  chieftain  himself,  he  has 


192         THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

DISTRIBUTION    AND    PLACE    OF    THE    HAY    INDUSTRY 

The  cultivated  hay  crop  is  general  in  the  north  temperate  zone 
and  also  in  parts  of  the  south  temperate  zone,  except  on  the  pas- 
ture plains  above  mentioned,  and  even  there  it  is  rapidly  increas- 
ing in  irrigated  sections.  In  the  United  States,  Canada,  and 
Europe  it  is  a  very  important  crop.  In  the  United  States  it  nor- 
mally exceeds  the  wheat  crop  in  value,  and  about  equals  it  in 
area.  In  value,  corn  always,  and  cotton  sometimes,  far  exceeds  it. 
In  Manchuria,  Japan,  and  China  it  is  much  less  important  be- 
cause of  the  small  number  of  animals  to  be  supported.  The  hay 
crop  is  usually  much  more  productive  than  the  pasture  crop.  The 
time  of  the  pasturing  animal  has  no  cash  value.  The  harvest  is 
therefore  without  cost.  The  hay  crop  requires  work  animals, 
machines,  and  men.  It  must  have  a  substantial  yield  to  pay 
these  costs.  For  this  reason,  grasses  with  heavy  yield  are  usually 
chosen. 

Cultivated  hay  is  usually  made  of  clover  and  (in  the  United 
States)  timothy,  the  only  one  of  a  thousand  native  American 
grasses  *  yet  domesticated.  Throughout  large  parts  of  the 
United  States,  and  to  some  extent  in  Europe  also,  the  common 
practice  is  to  sow  the  grass  seed  in  the  fields  of  wheat,  oats,  rye, 
or  barley  when  these  small  grains  are  sown,  or  in  the  early 
spring  when  the  freezing,  thawing,  and  drying  of  the  ground 
open  little  cracks  to  receive  the  seed.  The  grass  starts  in  the 
grain  and  fully  establishes  itself  after  grain  harvest.  In  America 
it  is  a  common  practice  to  sow  both  clover  and  timothy.  The 
clover,  which  grows  quickly  and  vigorously,  matures  first,  yield- 
ing a  hay  crop  the  year  after  the  grain  crop.  In  the  next  year 
or  two  the  timothy  takes  possession  of  the  ground.  In  this  way 
several  hay  crops  or  pasture  crops  may  be  gathered  if  the  farmer 
so  desires,  before  the  grasses  die  out  and  the  field  is  again  plowed 
for  grain. 

In  the  United  States  the  corn-belt  is  also  the  great  hay  center. 
Indeed,  zones  producing  only  one  farm  crop  are  not  common. 

committed  the  unpardonable  offense  of  imperiling  the  life  of  the  com- 
munity, and  like  the  traitor,  he  must  make  the  supreme  payment — such  i? 
the  influence  of  environment  upon  ideas. 

*  A  striking  instance  of  the  possibilities  yet  awaiting  American  agrl 
culture  in  an  age  of  scientific  industry. 


HAY  AS  A  CROP 


193 


Per  Cent 


Maine 
New  Hamp. 


The  corn-belt  farms  frequently  consist  of  the  original  160  acres 
or  one-quarter  of  a  square  mile  which  the  government  gave  away 
to  settlers  from  forty  to  seventy  years  ago.    They  are  often 
divided   into   four   fields   of 
about  forty  acres  each,  one  of 
which  is  planted  to  corn,  an- 
other to  oats,  wheat,  or  bar- 
ley,  the  remaining  fields  in 
grass,  one  for  pasture  for  the 
cattle  in  summer,  the  other 
for  hay  for  the  cattle  in  win- 
ter.    Sometimes  the  propor- 
tion of  grain  is  larger.     The 
cattle  and  hogs  are  fattened, 
it  is  true,  largely  upon  corn, 

but   the    horses,    cattle,    and 
,  ,  FIG.  64. — Percentage  of  total  crop 

sheep    are    by    nature    grass  area  in  hay,  1913. 

eaters,  and  can  no  more  live 

entirely  upon  corn  than  we  can  live  entirely  upon  meat;  they 
must  eat  also  the  more  bulky  foods  such  as  hay.  This  is  the 
reason  for  the  system  of  mixed  farming  (cattle  and  grain)  that 
so  commonly  prevails  in  the  corn-belt,  in  the  whole  northern 
section  of  the  United  States,  and  in  western  Europe. 


Wisconsin 
N.  Dakota 
Mississippi 
New  Mexico 
Germany 


METHODS  OF  MAKING  HAY 

Methods  of  making  hay  have  greatly  improved  through  recent 
inventions  of  machinery.  The  mowing  machine  today  cuts  a 
swath  five,  six,  or  seven  feet  in  width  as  fast  as  the  horses  can 
walk.  If  the  team  averages  only  two  miles  an  hour  for  ten 
hours,  the  man  and  the  two  horses  cut  about  fifteen  acres  in  a 
day.  The  work  is  easy  and  swift  in  comparison  with  the  two 
acres  which,  by  arduous  labor,  a  man  cut  with  a  scythe  in  1850. 
Maud  Muller  no  longer  uses  her  own  muscle  to  rake  the  meadow 
sweet  with  hay  as  she  did  when  Whittier  poetically  described  this 
feature  of  New  England  haying.  The  modern  woman  farmer 
saves  time  and  strength  by  operating  a  big  wheel  rake  drawn  by 
one  or  two  horses,  or,  to  hasten  the  drying  process,  she  drives  a 
horse-drawn  tedder  with  many  kicking  feet,  which  stirs  the  hay 


194         THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

much  faster  and  better  than  the  old-time  hand  pitchfork.  A  kind 
of  elevator  called  a  hay-loader  is  often  attached  to  the  wagon,  to 
pick  up  the  hay  and  put  it  on  the  top  of  the  load  by  the  force 
of  its  own  driving  wheels.  Upon  reaching  the  barn  or  stack,  the 
hay  is  lifted  off,  hundreds  of  pounds  at  a  time,  by  a  large  fork 
or  sling  operated  by  the  horses  pulling  on  ropes.  So  great  is 
the  saving  of  labor  that,  in  some  of  the  alfalfa  fields  of  the  West, 
it  is  said  that  hay  could  be  made  before  the  war  at  a  labor  cost 
of  $1.00  per  ton,  even  though  the  wages  were  about  the  highest 
paid  anywhere  in  the  world.  This  low  unit  cost  made  hay  the 
cheapest  of  animal  foods,  with  the  result  that  productive  alfalfa 
land  brought  a  very  high  price  among  American  farm  lands. 

HAY   IN    COMMERCE 

The  bulk  of  hay  in  proportion  to  its  value  makes  it  compara- 
tively unknown  to  foreign  commerce.  In  normal  times  a  small 
quantity,  50-70,000  tons  per  year,  about  0.1  per  cent,  of  the 
American  crop,  is  compressed  into  bales  of  small  bulk  and 
shipped  to  western  Europe,  where  the  large  number  of  animals 
required  by  the  meat  and  milk-consuming  and  horse-using  popu- 
lations of  manufacturing  districts  makes  necessary  the  impor- 
tation of  stock  food.  Alfalfa  hay  is  at  times  sent  from  Chile  to 
England,  but  European  forage  imports  are  closely  restricted  in 
times  of  peace  to  large  amounts  of  the  more  easily  transported 
grains  or  concentrates.  During  the  Great  War  the  Allies  used 
prepared  food  for  their  cavalry  horses,  the  basis  of  which  was 
alfalfa  meal  ground  in  a  California  mill.  To  offset  the  lack  of 
hay  the  Europeans  grow  root  crops  for  stock-feed — mangel- 
wurzels,  turnips,  and  rutabagas,  in  quantities  unknown  in  the 
United  States.  In  Canada  also  root  crops  are  extensively  grown. 
Ontario  had  nearly  100,000  acres  in  turnips  in  1917,  and  the 
yield  was  430  bushels  per  acre.  Root  crops  are  the  cool  climate 
counterpart  of  silage,  the  finest  stored  forage  in  the  world.  Rich 
is  the  land  that  has  it — America!  Handicapped  is  the  land 
that  has  it  not — Europe! 

Domestic  commerce  in  hay  in  the  United  States  is  much  larger 
than  the  foreign  commerce.  Hay  is  regularly  sent  from  the 
corn-belt  to  the  cotton-belt,  where  in  a  region  that  might  produce 


NEW  ENGLAND  HAY  FIELDS 


195 


all  its  own  forage  and  a  surplus  for  export,  the  people  have  long 
devoted  themselves  so  exclusively  to  cotton  growing  that  they 
frequently  buy  food  for  their  work  animals.  Hay  is  also  of  con- 
siderable importance  to  local  commerce  in  various  parts  o£ 
America  where  horses  work  at  lumbering  and  mining  in  moun- 
tainous or  forest  regions.  To  the  city  horse  also  it  is  evident 
that  hay  must  be  sent. 
Consequently,  in  the  ag- 
gregate, there  is  a  large  in- 
ternal commerce  in  hay. 
Because  the  many  cities  of 
New  England  and  the 
Northeastern  States  make 
that  region  the  greatest 
American  hay  market,  the  farmers  of  New  York  and  New 
England  find  the  selling  of  hay  more  profitable  than  do  the 
farmers  of  other  states.  In  many  districts  of  New  England  it  is 
almost  the  only  crop  grown  for  sale.  The  soil  in  many  localities 


Fie.  65 — This  laborious  crop  is 
the  cold-climate  substitute  for  silage. 
(Finch  and  Baker.) 


LEADING        PROVINCES       IN 
HAY        ACHCAGC 
ounce...  ......  

PCD 

CENT 

or     cue 

PPED       L 

»ND          IN 

_                    t 

HAY 

)                       n 

new  wuNjwien.  ........  . 

10  v»  KOTI*  .  
P»'»CC  COOIKO  l»l»0...  . 

— 

HANITOW..  ...... 
•HITIIM    CCIUMIH  ... 

FIG.    66. — Hay    is    much    more    important    in    the    rocky    northeast 
in  the  level  grain  country  of  Manitoba.      (Finch  and  Baker.) 


than 


is  so  rocky  that  it  is  difficult  to  plow,  but  when  the  ground  has 
been  sown  with  grass  and  the  surface  stones  picked  up,  hay  can 
be  cut  year  after  year,  with  the  result  that,  in  the  New  England 
States,  hay  is  by  far  the  most  important  crop  grown,  occupying 
more  land  in  some  states  than  all  other  crops  together.  The 
total  hay  crop  of  New  England  is,  however,  much  smaller  than 
that  of  an  equal  area  in  the  corn-belt,  because  of  the  raucb 
smaller  proportion  of  the  land  under  cultivation,  and  the  low 
yield  of  old  fields.  Some  hay  is  also  bought  by  Eastern  dairy 
farmers  who  find  that  they  can  afford  to  pay  freight  on  hay  be- 
cause of  the  advantage  of  producing  milk  close  to  a  market. 


196        THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

HAY    IN    IRRIGATED    COUNTRIES    AND    IN   EUROPE 

The  best  of  all  hay  plants  is  the  alfalfa,  a  very  deep-rooting 
clover  which  lives  for  many  years,  can  slumber  through  months 
of  drought,  spring  into  rapid  growth  the  very  day  that  water  is 
applied,  and  can  produce  five  or  six  tons  of  hay  per  acre  each 
season  in  three  or  four  cuttings  on  rich  irrigated  land.  In  sub- 


FIG.  67. — Alfalfa  is  the  king  crop  of  the  region  of  irrigation.  We 
can  trace  river  valleys  by  its  distribution.  It  is  also  important  in  the 
transition  region  of  Kansas,  Nebraska,  and  Oklahoma,  but  has  not  yet 
succeeded  extensively  in  the  more  humid  East.  (Finch  and  Baker.) 

tropic  climates  such  as  Egypt,  the  oases  of  the  northern  Sahara, 
and  the  very  similar  oases  of  Arizona  and  southeastern  Cali- 
fornia, this  plant  will  grow  for  at  least  eleven  months  of  the 
year,  and  yield  eight  or  nine  cuttings  (ten  or  eleven  are  some- 
times claimed).  To  crown  its  virtues,  alfalfa  hay  is  rich  in  pro- 
tein, richer  than  wheat  flour.  Hay,  therefore,  reaches  perhaps 
its  greatest  relative  importance  in  the  irrigated  districts  inter- 
spersed among  the  arid  and  semi-arid  lands  of  the  American 
"West,  where  alfalfa  alone  makes  satisfactory  stock-raising  pos- 
sible. As  alfalfa  .is  a  plant  of  almost  world-wide  distribution,  the 
same  procedure  is  common  in  other  arid  regions,  such  as  Chile, 


ALFALFA,  KING  OF  HAY 


197 


Nebraska  Experiment     157  Days 


Lha  Fed 


Daily  Gala 


$17.42 


6.90 


FIG.  68. — Showing  profit  in 
feeding  alfalfa  with  corn  and 
therefore  its  usefulness  in  the 
corn-belt.  (From  Holden,  Inter- 
national Harvester  Company.) 


Argentina,  and  many  parts  of  the  Old  World.    A  typical  scene 

in  all  the  irrigated  regions  of  North  America  is  that  of  cattle  or 

sheep  that  have  come  in  from  the  nearby  dry  range  feeding  on 

the  stalks  of  alfalfa  in  a  sea* 

son  when  pastures  have  failed. 

Great  benefit  to  the  farmers  in 

the   Mississippi    Valley    is    ex- 
pected from  the  new  and  hardy 

varieties  of  alfalfa  recently  in- 
troduced  from   Turkestan   and 

Siberia.    Upon  the  plains  of  the 

Po  in  northern  Italy  where  the 

irrigation  water,  sometimes  rich 

with  the  mud  ground  by  glaciers 

from  the  Alpine  cliffs,  is  turned 

upon  the  fields,  it  is  said  that  as 

many  as  nine  crops  of  hay  per 

year  are  gathered ;  on  this  account  the  district  is  able  to  export 

butter  and  cheese  to  less  favored  sections. 

As  a  whole,  hay  is  more  im- 
portant to  European  than  to 
American  animal  husbandry. 
Europe  has  more  cattle  to  the 
square  mile,  and  since  Euro- 
pean cattle  are  rarely  pastured, 
a  larger  proportion  of  European 
land  is  in  hay.  Europe  has  so 
little  pasture  because  of  its 
comparatively  low  yield.  The 
best  pasture  lands  of  France 
or  England  or  Illinois  yield 
about  150  pounds  live  weight 
of  meat  per  year,  whereas  if 
the  same  land  is  planted  in 
grain  and  hay  and  the  produce 
fed  to  the  animals,  the  meat 
or  400  pounds  per  acre.  In  Sweden 
important  and  the  climate  so 


Illinois  Experiment  -  6  Cows 


K.r-it  IVriwi'J  »-,-.  !;i 

S.-i:  in.l  IV-riu.l;)  »-tLl  •_• 

.... 

•K 

. 

x 

<J 

'/ 

s 

\ 

,, 

rj 

r. 

s; 

L- 

t2 

Alt 

ilf 

'A 

/ 

S 

^ 

S* 

' 

^s 

^c 

^- 

,, 

,.J 

^tvV- 

-' 

T^ 

FIG.  69— Note  that  figures  do 
not  begin  at  zero.  Decline  in 
first  period  explained  by  very  cold 
weather.  Two  lots  of  cows  fed 
on  constant  quantities  of  corn 
silago  and  corn  meal  received 
their  protein  from  bran  and  al- 
falfa in  equal  amounts.  The 
source  of  protein  was  changed  in 
the  midst  of  the  experiment,  and 
in  each  case  the  better  yield  in 
milk  went  with  the  alfalfa,  home- 
grown and  cheaper  than  bran. 
(From  Holden,  International  Har- 
vester Company. ) 


yield  can  go  up  to  300 

the   nay    crop    is    so    vastly 

unfavorable  for  harvesting  it  that  the  poor  peasant  must  actually 


198         THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

spread  the  grass  out  under  sheds  to  protect  it  from  the  rain 
until  it  dries,  and  then  shelter  it  for  winter  use.  It  is  at  times 
brought  down  to  the  barn  from  heights  on  trolleys  that  travel  on 
wire  cables.  Such  laborious  conditions  of  agriculture  explain 
the  emigration  of  Scandinavians  to  America;  we  can  readily  see 
why  people  who  had  been  able  to  live  in  such  a  country  quickly 


FIG.  70. — The    universality    of    the    European    hay    crop    shows    why    her 
animal  numbers  exceed  those  of  the  United  States. 

prosper  in  roomy  America,  with  its  more  favorable  climate  and 
its  many  opportunities. 

To  the  Icelanders,  hay  is  a  necessary  feature  of  a  hard  exist- 
ence. Wool  is  one  of  their  chief  money  crops,  and,  in  order  to 
feed  the  sheep  through  their  arctic  winters,  they  literally  shave 
their  hummocky  hay  fields  with  scythes. 

As  eastern  Europe  resembles  America's  plains,  Russia  with  its 
great  plains,  long  cold  winters,  and  millions  of  cattle  and  horses 
furnishes  the  region  of  greatest  hay  production.  Before  the 
war,  part  of  the  Russian  crop  found  its  way  to  the  London 
market  in  the  form  of  ever-increasing  quantities  of  butter 
shipped  from  places  as  remote  as  central  Siberia. 

Pasture,  hay,  and  such  grain  as  we  can  spare,  or  they  must 


THE  BEAST  BASE  199 

have,  are  the  food  of  all  our  useful  beasts  except  the  dog, 
and,  because  of  our  dependence  on  draft  animals,  they  may  be 
called  raw  material  for  nearly  all  the  rest  of  our  agriculture. 


OUR   DEPENDENCE   UPON    BEASTS   OF   BURDEN 

Although  man  dominates  the  earth,  he  is  physically  weak  in 
comparison  with  the  brute  animals  he  has  captured  and  enslaved, 
and  he  has  been  able  to  possess  the  earth  only  by  bringing  their 
greater  strength  to  his  aid.  The  taming  of  these  great  beasts 
until  they  obey  and  serve  was  one  of  the  great  achievements  of 
the  race,  a  great  debt  that  we  owe  to  the  past,  for  the  most  part 
indeed  to  the  prehistoric  races.  Some  animals  were  tamed  so 
long  ago  that  there  is  still  dispute  among  the  scientists  as  to  their 
original  parentage.  Our  domestic  cow  is  an  example.  Had 
there  been  less  room  for  roaming,  and  more  natural  protection 
for  settlements  and  property  in  the  United  States,  the  bison 
might  have  been  domesticated  here  as  were  the  reindeer  and  the 
yaks  in  Asia.  This  result  is  by  no  means  certain,  for  the  bison 
has  a  rather  bad  disposition  which  makes  him  at  times  turn  upon 
his  keeper  and  rend  him.  Draft  animals  seem  necessary  to  the 
ascent  of  a  people  toward  civilization,  although  in  parts  of  Japan 
and  China  it  has  been  shown  that  need  of  them  can  ultimately 
be  reduced  to  a  minimum. 

Man  has  often  praised  the  intelligence  of  his  animals,  espe- 
cially the  horse.  We  should  equally  praise  his  splendid  stu- 
pidity. Fortunately,  while  strong  enough  to  work  and  intelli- 
gent enough  to  be  trained,  the  horse  is  ignorant  of  his  powers 
and  thus  obeys  us  and  is  continually  deceived  by  the  flimsiest 
pretenses.  The  horse  or  the  ox  will  stay  hungry  within  an 
inclosure  fenced  by  loose  rails  which  he  could  push  down  with 
one-tenth  of  the  energy  that  he  daily  exerts  against  his  collar  or 
yoke  in  doing  his  regular  task.  Not  all  animals,  however,  -are 
thus  easily  domesticated.  Some  of  them  insist  on  exerting  their 
powers,  so  that  we  cannot  use  them.  All  the  animals  of  great 
use  to  man  went  in  droves  or  herds  and  were  accustomed  to 
obedience  to  a  leader,  so  that  the  authority  of  man  probably 
replaced,  in  their  small  minds,  the  authority  of  the  leader  of  the 


200         THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

herd  with  which  their  ancestors  ran.  That  very  intelligent 
animal,  the  cat,  which  for  ages  past  has  individually  and  stealth- 
ily lain  in  wait  for  his  prey,  sleeps  by  our  fire,  eats  our  food, 
but  refuses  to  be  our  servant,  while  the  pack-hunting  dog  will 
die  for  us  as  did  his  wild  ancestors  for  the'  pack.  By  some 
strange  chance  all  of  the  animals  capable  of  effective  domesti- 
cation were  originally  found  in  the  Old  World ;  the  New  World 
suffered  under  the  great  handicap  of  the  lack  of  such  animals 
save  the  relatively  inefficient  llama  and  vicuna  of  the  central 
Andes. 

Most  of  man's  work  has  been  done  by  ten  animals,  five  of  them 
of  almost  world-wide  distribution — the  horse,  ox,  ass,  mule,  and 
dog — and  five  of  very  special  location — the  camel,  elephant,  rein- 
deer, yak,  and  llama,  Our  methods  of  using  them  vary  accord- 
ing to  the  nature  of  the  work,  climate,  and  roads,  but  our  de- 
pendence upon  them  is  absolute.  Despite  all  our  improvements 
in  machinery,  we  yet  depend  upon  the  muscles  of  trained  animals 
for  the  production  of  nearly  all  the  food  used  both  in  Europe 
and  America. 


GROUP   I.      DRAFT   ANIMALS   OP    GENERAL   DISTRIBUTION 

1.  THE  HORSE.  The  horse,  the  aristocrat  of  draft  animals, 
probably  does  as  much  work  as  all  the  other  draft  animals. 
Horses  are  used  throughout  the  temperate  zones  except  in  the 
most  extreme  deserts,  the  tropic  forests,  and  the  snow-covered 
polar  regions,  and  even  there  they  are  sometimes  o£  value,  as 
shown  by  the  surprising  efficiency  of  Manchurian  ponies  in  an 
English  antarctic  expedition  of  1908-09.  Chiefly  because  of  the 
attack  of  insects,  horses  do  not  flourish  so  well  in  the  more  humid 
parts  of  the  tropic  and  sub-tropic  regions  as  in  dry  climates. 
They  are  largely  confined  to  the  territory  occupied  by  the  Cau- 
casian race.  Thus  the  United  States  (24  million),  Canada  (2.3 
million),  Europe  (44  million),  and  Asiatic  Russia  (10  million) 
have  about  80  million  out  of  the  99  million  horses  reported  in 
the  Year-book  of  the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture, 
1913.  By  contrast,  India  had  1.6  million  horses,  78  million 
cattle  other  than  dairy  cows,  and  17  n/illion  buffaloes — convinc- 


THE  STEED  OF  ARABIA  201 

ing  proof  of  the  superiority  of  cattle  over  horses  in  the  tropics. 
Note  the  close  relation  of  the  number  of  Indian  bovine  to  the 
world's  horses:  95-99. 

The  best  and  most  famous  horses  are  those  of  Arabia,  which 
live  in  story  books. 

For  many  centuries  the  Arabian  horses,  fed  partly  upon  the 
barley  of  the  oases,  were  supposed  to  be  the  best  of  all  breeds, 
but  several  importations  of  the  best  Arabian  steeds  throughout 
the  nineteenth  century  have  shown  them  to  be  inferior  in  speed, 
strength,  and  endurance  to  the  breeds  of  western  Europe.  Partly 
Arabic  in  their  origin,  the  latter  have  for  several  hundred  years 
been  bred  with  great  care  by  the  selection  of  only  the  best 
parents  for  each  new  generation,  with  the  result  that  the  horse 
of  the  West  now  surpasses  his  distant  cousins  in  the  old  home 
in  Asia.  The  English  especially  are  great  lovers  of  the  horse, 
and  for  several  hundred  years  have  been  the  leaders  in  the  im- 
provement of  the  breeds. 

There  are  three  general  types  of  horses :  First,  the  stocky  draft 
horse  to  draw  heavy  loads,  which  originated  in  the  good  agricul- 
tural lands  of  western  Europe;  second,  the  thoroughbred  or  run- 
ning horse,  a  product  of  England's  race  courses;  and  third,  the 
driving  horse.  Of  the  last  there  are  many  kinds,  including  the 
trotting  horse,  or  roadster,  developed  in  America.  There  are 
various  sizes  and  minor  classifications  under  each  of  the  three 
classes.  The  automobile  has  wrought  such  sad  havoc  to  the  popu- 
larity of  the  driving  horse  that  the  breed  is  in  danger  of  de- 
generating; the  United  States  Government  has  actually  gone 
into  horse-breeding  in  order  to  assure  itself  enough  cavalry 
mounts. 

As  an  industry,  the  production  of  horses  for  sale  is  always 
carried  on  in  regions  that  are  good  for  the  production  of  cattle: 
for  both  animals  have  the  same  physical  and  climatic  needs.  The 
farmer  with  his  hay  and  his  pasture  grounds  has  the  choice  of 
selling  his  crops  of  grain  and  hay  in  the  form  of  cattle,  or  in  the 
more  valuable  form  of  horses.  The  form  he  selects  depends 
largely  upon  his  skill  and  taste  and  the  district  in  which  he 
lives.  A  given  amount  of  forage  will  usually  be  of  more  value 
when  converted  into  a  horse  than  when  converted  into  a  bullock 
or  cow,  but  owing  to  the  nervous,  sensitive,  high-strung  char- 

LIBRARY 

<*  *  C  I  ~"E 


202          THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

acter  of  tho  horse,  and  his  tendency  to  excitement,*  it  takes  more 
care,  watchfulness,  and  labor  to  bring  him  to  maturity  without 
the  accidents  which  so  often  reduce  or  destroy  his  market  value. 


THE    BREEDS   AND   GROWING    OP    HORSES   IN   EUROPE 

In  northwestern  Europe  many  horses  are  raised,  but,  as  with 
cattle  and  sheep,  their  number  is  insufficient  to  meet  the  needs 
of  the  people.  Britain  has  two  heavy  draft  breeds,  called  the 
Shire  and  Clydesdale.  Liege  in  Belgium  was  a  famous  market 
for  the  heavy  Flemish  draft  horses  grown  in  that  vicinity.  The 
north  of  France  also  produced  many  horses  of  the  Belgian 
breed,  and  also  the  Percheron,  named  from  the  French  depart- 
ment De  Perche.  This  breed,  because  of  an  infusion  of  Arabian 
blood,  is  the  quickest  of  the  heavy  draft  animals,  and  was  long 
used  to  draw  the  omnibuses  on  the  streets  of  Paris,  until  in 
January,  1913,  the  last  one  was  replaced  by  the  automobile. 
During  the  war  which  raged  for  more  than  four  years  over  most 
of  the  French  and  Belgian  heavy  draft  horse  region,  the  stock 
was  almost  entirely  exterminated,  or  carried  off  to  Germany. 
But  fortunately  it  can  be  restored  by  breeding  animals  from 
other  parts  of  France,  and  if  need  be  from  the  United 
States. 

In  Germany  the  greatest  horse-raising  region  is  the  grassy 
country  near  the  North  Sea.  In  northeastern  Prussia  the  raising 
of  cavalry  horses  was  an  industry  encouraged  by  the  German 
Government  as  part  of  its  system  of  developing  the  army.  Den- 
mark has  been  an  important  exporter  of  heavy  draft  and  cavalry 
horses  to  Germany  and  England,  but  the  Danish  farmers  are 
finding  that  they  can  get  better  returns  from  their  oats,  barley, 
and  hay  by  converting  them  into  dairy  products.  In  Hungary 
horses  and  mules  are  allowed  to  run  in  large  herds  on  the  level 
plain  which  constitutes  most  of  that  country,  and  which  in  the 
central  part  is  rather  too  dry  for  grain,  though  excellent  for 
pasture  land.  Russia,  with  a  hundred  million  people  and  half 

*  If  a  cow  gets  her  foot  caught  in  barbed  wire,  she  will  carefully  take 
it  out  the  way  she  got  it  in,  and  go  unharmed  upon  her  way.  Under  the 
same  circumstances  a  horse  will  plunge  and  kick,  saw  through  every 
muscle  to  the  bone,  and  cripple  hiiiself  for  life — a  stupid,  floundering, 
and  needless  suicide. 


HORSES  ON  PLAINS  203 

the  area  of  Europe,  including  an  enormous  region  of  level  pas- 
ture plains,  has  produced  quite  half  the  horses  of  all  Europe, 
and  recently  had  more  than  any  other  country  in  the  world ;  at 
the  opening  of  the  war  she  had  about  the  same  number  as  the 
United  States.  Russian  horses  are  mast  extensively  raised  in  the 
central,  southern,  and  southeastern  parts  of  the  country.  In  the 
region  of  the  Caspian,  the  Cossacks  have  for  centuries  lived  in 
a  range  country  like  the  plains  of  Texas  and  New  Mexico,  too 
dry  for  agriculture,  but  favorable  for  flocks  and  herds ;  the  Cos- 
sack is  really  the  cowboy  of  Russia. 

THE   AMERICAN    HORSE    INDUSTRY 

Horses  of  the  European  breeds  early  made  their  escape  from 
the  Spanish  settlements  in  Mexico  and  ran  wild  on  the  western 
plains  and  mountains  for  three  centuries  until,  with  the  buffalo, 
they  almost  vanished  before  the  American  settler  in  the  last 
quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century.  A  few  bands  have  survived 
into  the  twentieth  century  in  New  Mexico  and  Colorado.  These 
wild  or  half-wild  horses,  usually  called  Indian  ponies  or  cayuses, 
had  degenerated  in  size,  but  had  developed  wonderful  endurance 
in  their  search  for  food,  water,  and  safety  from  man  and  the  wolf 
pack.  After  the  first  settlement  of  the  plains,  they  ran  on  the 
range  and  were  cared  for  like  range  cattle,  being  caught  at  inter- 
vals, branded,  and  sold  when  ready  for  the  market.  Like  the 
similarly  wild  cattle  this  breed  has  now  almost  disappeared  on 
account  of  admixture  with  the  larger  European  breeds  brought 
from  the  Eastern  States. 

One  of  the  best-known  centers  of  American  horse  production  is 
the  blue-grass  region  of  central  Kentucky,  with  the  city  of  Lex- 
ington as  its  center.  This  plain  of  eight  or  ten  thousand  square 
miles  is  underlain  by  a  bed  of  limestone,  which  upon  exposure 
to  the  air  breaks  up  into  a  soil  of  great  fertility  where  blue  grass 
grows  to  perfection.  This  is  one  of  the  best  of  pasture  grasses, 
especially  for  horses,  one  of  the  chief  money  crops  of  this  region. 
Trotting  and  carriage  horses  were  until  recently  the  chief  kinds 
produced;  the  horses  from  the  Lexington  market  have  pranced 
through  every  fine  city  park  in  the  United  States  and  many  of 
those  in  Europe.  The  small  area  of  the  Kentucky  blue-gra&s 


204         THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

region  causes  it  to  be  of  far  less  total  importance  in  horse  pro- 
duction than  is  the  corn-belt. 

Throughout  the  whole  extent  of  the  corn-belt,  beside  the  farms 
where  some  men  are  fattening  pigs  and  others  fattening  cattle, 
still  others  have  droves  of  colts,  usually  of  the  heavy  draft  breeds 
— Percherons,  Clydesdales,  Shires,  or  Belgian  breeds  originally 
brought  from  France,  Scotland,  or  Belgium.  When  four  or  five 
years  old,  these  horses  are  sent  by  carloads  to  the  Eastern  cities 
and  to  many  agricultural  districts  where  the  farmers  find  it  more 
profitable  to  raise  crops  suited  to  nearby  markets  and  to  buy 
their  horses,  which  can  easily  come  from  afar. 

There  are  occasional  horse  ranches  on  the  Great  Plains  of  the 
United  States  from  Canada  to  Mexico,  whence  horses  are  sent  to 
the  mining  and  timber  camps  of  the  mountains,  as  well  as  to  the 
farms  of  the  new  settler  or  to  the  Eastern  market. 

The  raising  of  a  few  colts  is  a  widely  scattered  supply  crop  and 
an  occasional  money  crop  on  some  farms  in  almost  all  parts  of 
the  United  States.  It  is  of  greater  importance  in  the  Piedmont 
section  of  northern  Virginia  than  in  any  other  district  east  of 
the  Appalachians.  Excellent  cavalry  horses  are  produced  here; 
the  United  States  Government  maintains  a  remount  station  at 
Fort  Eoyal. 

The  industrial  depression  in  the  United  States  in  1894-97  was 
particularly  severe  in  the  horse  market.  The  use  of  the  bicycle 
and  of  the  electric  trolley  car  was  rapidly  increasing,  with  the 
result  that  horses  were  so  cheap  that  a  five-year-old  would  some- 
times bring  no  more  than  he  had  been  worth  as  a  six-months-old 
colt.  At  that  time  American  horse  dealers  sought  a  market  in 
Europe  and  began  to  export  horses,  chiefly  to  markets  in  Eng- 
land, Germany,  Holland,  and  Belgium.  This  foreign  trade 
still  continues;  in  it  Canada  also  participates,  the  farmers  of 
Ontario  and  Quebec  supplying  nearly  one-third  of  the  horses 
exported  to  England.  The  number  of  horses  in  Europe  is  at 
the  present  time  greatly  depleted  for  several  reasons.  Scarcity 
of  shipping  has  made  it  difficult  to  import  them.  The  war 
killed  them  by  hundreds  of  thousands,  and  food  has  been  too 
scarce  to  keep  up  the  usual  increase  in  production.  With  the 
coming  of  a  stable  peace,  there  will  doubtless  be  a  large  exporta- 
tion of  ordinary  work  animals  from  North  America  to  Europe. 


ADAPTATION  TO  ENVIRONMENT 


205 


1.  THE  PONY.  Where  the  horse  has  been  long  in  regions  of 
scanty  food  supply,  he  has  degenerated  in  size.  Ponies  have  thus 
been  produced,  the  breeds  usually  bearing  the  name  of  their  place 
of  origin — Russian,  Manchurian,  Welsh,  Iceland,  Orkney,  Shet- 
land, Zacatecas — and  many  of  them  show  pronounced  adapta- 
tion to  their  environment.  The  Zacatecas  pony  from  the  Mexi- 
can state  of  that  name  is  of  Spanish  stock,  sleek  of  coat,  short 


FIG.  71. — The  Shetland  pony  with  its  short  legs  and  long  coat  is  an 
interesting  response  to  an  environment,  the  cold  raw,  damp  Shetland 
Islands.  (Photo  C.  S.  Plumb,  Columbus,  O.) 

of  hair,  long  of  limb,  and  fleet  from  the  climbing  of  high  moun- 
tains and  going  far  in  an  arid  country  for  his  food  and  water. 
The  slow,  short-legged,  coarse-maned  Shetland  pony  with  his 
tub  of  a  body,  his  long  and  shaggy  coat,  has  been  produced 
by  the  humid,  raw,  and  cold  climate  on  the  heather-clad  hills 
of  Shetland  near  the  latitude  of  southern  Greenland.  His  hair 
is  a  veritable  thatch  roof.  It  turns  water  like  sealskin.  His 
mane  and  foretop  almost  inclose  his  head  like  a  hood;  his  pro- 
jecting ear  is  full  of  hair.  His  luxuriant  tail  is  a  long  over- 
coat enveloping  his  hind  legs,  ard  with  his  back  to  the  wind  he 


206         THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD    SUPPLY 

can  come  dry  and  warm  through  the  biting  damp  northwester 
from  out  the  Greenland  seas.  A  sleet  may  sheathe  him  in  ice 
like  armor,  beneath  which  his  fur  is  as  warm  and  dry  as  a  nest 
of  kittens.  Grant  this  breed  pasture,  hay,  and  a  shed  in  Iowa, 
and  it  increases  in  height  ten  per  cent,  in  the  first  generation. 
2  and  3.  THE  MULE  AND  THE  DONKEY  OB  Ass.  The  mule, 
which  has  a  donkey  for  a  father  and  a  horse  for  a  mother,  is  in 
some  respects  a  better  draft  animal  than  either  parent.  The 
donkey  is  conspicuous  among  the  common  draft  animals  for  its 
strength,  its  extreme  hardiness,  longevity,  and  ability  to  thrive 
like  a  goat  upon  rough  food  and  under  poor  conditions.  The 
wild  ass  is  still  found  in  the  most  desolate  parts  of  Turkestan, 
where  his  fleetness  and  hardiness  enable  him  to  survive  even  in 
the  home  of  the  wild  camel.  From  this  parent  the  mule  inherits 
long  life,  a  hard  small  hoof,  sure-footedness,  and  the  ability  to 
thrive  on  little  food;  in  all  of  these  respects  it  excels  the  horse, 
from  which  it  inherits  size  and  strength.  The  chief  reason  why 
the  mule  has  not  more  generally  displaced  the  horse  is  pride  on 
the  part  of  the  owner.  Men  love  their  horses  and  admire  them ; 
but  the  mule,  with  his  big  head,  long  ears,  his  noisy  bray,  and  the 
superior  intelligence  which  makes  him  resent  abuse  with  his  heels, 
is  not  so  much  loved  nor  so  popular.  The  inability  of  this  hybrid 
animal  to  reproduce  has  also  had  much  to  do  with  his  limited 
popularity  in  good  countries.  For  nearly  all  kinds  of  service 
he  is  really  the  superior  animal,  yet  the  world's  horses  are  six 
times  as  numerous  as  the  mules  and  asses  combined. 

THE   DISTRIBUTION   OF  DONKEYS   AND    MULES 

The  mule  and  the  donkey  (especially  the  donkey)  prevail 
where  conditions  of  life  are  hard.  Thus  Asiatic  Turkey  and 
India  have  nearly  half  the  donkeys  of  the  world,  and  Spain, 
Italy,  and  Algeria  have  a  fourth.  The  north  of  France,  with  its 
rich  pastures,  produces  the  fine,  fat  Percherons  and  the  French 
r^oach  horses.  But  southern  France,  with  the  drier  climate  of  the 
Mediterranean,  has  poorer  pastures,  where  mules  and  donkeys  are 
bred.  The  drier  the  district  in  Spain,  the  greater  is  the  prepon- 
derance of  donkeys.  Spain  furnishes  half  the  mules  of  Europe, 
and  from  its  arid  plateaus  exports  to  all  the  world  the  finest  asses 


THE  UNLOVELY  MULE  207 

to  be  used  in  the  breeding  of  mules.  Spanish  horses  are  but  one- 
fourth  as  numerous  as  the  donkeys  and  mules.  Throughout  the 
desert  region  from  Morocco  to  Pekin  the  mule  and  the  donkey 
climb  the  hills,  thread  the  mountain  passes,  browse  on  the  arid 
plains  in  companionship  with  the  camel,  that  braves  the  worst 
desert,  the  ox  that  draws  the  creaking  cart,  and  the  horse  that 
bears  the  proud  chieftain.  The  horse  is  the  only  member  of  the 
party  that  gets  much  or  any  grain,  and  horses  of  the  desert  are 
much  more  numerous  in  poems  and  story  books  than  in  real  life. 
The  Arab  much  more  often  rides  the  thorn-eating  camel  than  the 
grain-eating  horse,  and  the  donkey  also  carries  many  a  burden 
and  many  an  Arab  on  the  desert's  edge. 

In  the  mountains  of  every  country  and  every  state  between 
Alaska  and  Patagonia,  the  mule  and  the  donkey  are  of  great 
relative  importance.  They  serve  wherever  work  is  difficult,  as 
in  climbing  the  mountain  trail,  hauling  cars  in  mines  and  loads 
of  logs  in  lumber  camps.  They  toil  alike  upon  the  fearful  trails 
beneath  the  equator  from  the  ocean  to  the  Andes;  or  before  the 
mine  car  filled  with  gold  ore  in  Colorado,  with  coal  in  Pennsyl- 
vania, or  with  lead  in  the  Altai  Mountains  of  Siberia. 

Good  mules  are  raised  and  used  in  Manchuria  and  north  China 
and  even  exported  from  Tientsin  for  service  in  the  British  army 
in  India.  In  Pekin  the  mule  has  the  favored  position  of  the 
chosen  driving  animal  of  the  government  officials  as  they  travel 
about  the  city  in  their  "Pekin  carts";  this  is  one  of  the  few 
places  where  the  mule  has  the  luck  to  be  in  style.  But  the  auto- 
mobile is  invading  even  this  domain. 

The  ability  of  the  mule  to  resist  a  more  humid  climate  than  the 
horse  gives  him  predominance  over  the  horse  in  the  tropics  and  in 
the  southern  part  of  the  United  States.*  In  Illinois,  Iowa,  and 
Kansas  the  mules  comprised  five  per  cent,  of  the  four  and  one- 
fourth  million  of  equine  draft  animals;  but  more  than  half  of  the 
one  and  two-fifths  million  in  Alabama,  Mississippi,  and  Louisi- 
ana are  mules.  Some  of  the  cotton  states  show  a  greater  number 
of  mules  than  do  the  mule-producing  states,  for  almost  all  cotton 
cultivators  are  mule-drawn.  The  mule  often  stays  in  the  state  of 

*  There  is  a  saying  in  certain  humid  localities  of  the  Southern  Statc-8, 
that  "  This  place  is  hell  for  women  and  horses,  but  heaven  for  men  and 
mules." 


208          THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD    SUPPLY 

his  birth  only  two  or  three  years,  and  then  plows  cotton  for 
twenty  years. 


THE   AMERICAN   MULE   INDUSTRY 

The  finest  mules  in  the  "United  States  are  grown  in  the  horse 
belt  of  Kentucky  and  adjacent  districts  of  Tennessee,  where  the 
mothers  are  of  the  driving-horse  breed.  Missouri  is  probably  the 
greatest  mule-producing  region  of  the  United  States;  under  a 
single  roof  in  St.  Louis  five  thousand  mules  are  sometimes  for 
sale.  From  this  market,  and  from  Kentucky  and  Tennessee,  they 
are  distributed  over  a  very  wide  area  in  the  United  States  and  in 
foreign  countries.  War  brings  a  demand  for  mules  to  bear  the 
army  burden.  When  Spain  was  at  war  with  Cuba,  she  bought 
American  mules  for  the  use  of  her  armies  in  that  island,  and 
during  the  three  years  of  the  Boer  War  in  South  Africa  our  mule 
export  was  six  times  the  normal  figure.  The  English  dependence 
upon  American  mules  was  so  great  that  officers  of  the  British 
army  opened  headquarters  in  all  the  American  mule  markets, 
bought  mules  by  the  thousands,  sent  them  from  New  Orleans  to 
Cape  Town  by  shiploads,  and  so  reduced  the  number  in  America 
that  their  price  for  years  was  higher  than  that  of  horses.  These 
mules  made  such  a  reputation  that  the  Johannesburg  Corporation 
imported  124  mules  in  January,  1911,  stipulating  that  they 
should  all  be  bred  in  Missouri. 

In  the  twelve  months  before  the  outbreak  of  the  European 
war,  the  United  States  exported  22,000  horses  and  5,000  mules. 
In  the  next  year,  the  first  year  of  the  war,  the  horse  ship- 
ments reached  289,000,  the  mule  shipments  65,000.  In  1917 
the  increasing  ship  scarcity  had  reduced  the  horse  shipments  a 
little  to  278,000,  but  the  mule  shipments  had  more  than  doubled, 
137,000.  If  there  had  been  ship  space,  it  is  probable  there  would 
have  been  a  couple  of  million  animals  taken  over,  so  great  was 
the  need  for  them  in  European  battlefields  and  grain  fields. 

There  is  little  doubt  that  with  the  increasing  cost  of  horse  feed 
in  the  United  States  the  good  qualities  of  the  mule  are  being 
more  generally  appreciated  and  his  use  is  becoming  more  exten- 
sive. From  1896  to  1912  the  number  of  horses  increased  about 
thirty-five  per  cent,  and  that  of  mules  about  ninety-five  per 


THE  PATIENCE  OF  THE  OX  209 

cent. ;  from.  1912  to  1918  the  increase  in  horses  was  five  per  cent., 
in  mules  ten  per  cent. 

4.  THE  Ox.  The  ox  easily  comes  next  to  the  horse  in  the  total 
amount  of  work  done  for  man.  In  almost  all  cattle-keeping 
countries  oxen  are  used,  to  a  slight  extent  at  least,  as  work 
animals,  though  not  so  much  as  in  past  periods,  because  of  com- 
petition with  the  more  efficient  horses,  mules,  and  donkeys. 
Among  the  peasants  of  northwestern  Europe,  even  the  cow  that 
supplies  the  family  with  milk  is  at  times  harnessed  to  the  wagon 
to  help  with  the  farm  labor.  Although  very  slow,  the  ox  is 
unquestionably  stronger  than  the  horse,  and,  deep  in  the  mud 
of  a  swamp,  will  pull  where  a  horse  would  not  even  make  a  try. 
If  the  load  does  not  move,  the  horse  and  mule  tend  to  make  a 
plunge  and  quit,  but  the  ox  will  throw  his  weight  against  the 
burden  and  pull  steadily,  a  quality  that  has  its  advantages  in 
trying  places,  but  is  of  small  value  on  good  roads.  Conse- 
quently, the  most  general  use  of  oxen  in  the  United  States  is  to 
haul  logs  in  the  woods ;  they  are  also  of  value  on  the  rocky  lands 
of  New  England,  where  they  are  more  common  than  in  any  other 
part  of  the  United  States.  In  the  muddy  sugar-cane  fields  of 
Cuba  and  on  the  very  bad  roads  in  parts  of  tropic  America  the 
ox-drawn  cart  is  generally  used  because  it  is  the  best  wheeled 
equipment  for  meeting  the  special  conditions,  which  often  re- 
semble those  of  the  morass  or  lumber  camp. 

OXEN   AND   AGRICULTURE 

The  general  use  of  oxen  in  agricultural  labor  usually  indicates 
an  industrially  backward  people  who  are  willing  to  content  them- 
selves with  slow  helpers  or  who  must  take  advantage  of  the 
factor  of  cheapness  arising  from  the  fact  that  the  ox  eats  little 
grain  and  can  eventually  be  sold  as  beef.  Such  a  combination 
of  oxen  with  primitive  agriculture  we  find  among  the  Arme- 
nians, Bulgarians,  Turks,  Rumanians,  and  other  peoples  of  south- 
ern and  eastern  Europe,  and  in  places  throughout  central  Asia 
to  Pekin  and  Manchuria.  The  Boers  of  South  Africa,  whose  dry 
country  has  grass  without  grain,  still  continue  to  use  teams  in 
which  several  spans  of  oxen  at  a  creeping  pace  draw  a  wagon 
of  enormous  size. 


210          THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD    SUPPLY 

In  India  it  is  probable  that  there  are  more  oxen  (a  part  of 
them  buffaloes)  used  than  in  all  the  rest  of  the  world.  The  hun- 
dreds of  millions  of  people  there  use  almost  no  other  beast  of 
burden.  Man  eats  the  grain  of  wheat,  barley,  rice,  millet,  and 
sorghum  of  many  varieties.  The  ox  contents  himself  with  the 
straw  and  fodder.  As  cattle  can  survive  the  tormenting  tropic 
insects  better  than  horses  or  even  mules,  oxen  are  probably  the 
most  common  agricultural  work  animal  of  the  tropics.  In  Porto 
Rico,  for  example,  they  are  the  mainstay  of  agriculture.  On  the 
muddy  roads  and  in  the  muddy  rice  fields  of  the  Philippines,  a 
part  of  India,  and  southeastern  Asia,  the  carabao  or  water  buf- 
falo, an  economic  duplicate  and  a  zoologic  cousin  of  the  ox,  is 
the  prevalent  beast  of  burden,  although  his  slowness  probably 
makes  him  the  least  efficient  of  all  the  larger  draft  animals.  He 
is  called  the  water  buffalo  because,  like  the  hog,  he  seeks  refuge 
from  the  heat  and  insects  by  burying  himself  in  mud  and  water 
in  the  hot  season  whenever  he  is  not  busy  gathering  food.  In- 
dia's seventy-five  million  cattle  other  than  dairy  cows  make  that 
country  far  and  away  the  leading  cattle  country  of  the  world, 
without  counting  the  seventeen  million  buffaloes  that  really  be- 
long in  the  same  economic  class. 

5.  THE  DOG.  Least  important  of  the  general  draft  animals 
is  the  dog,  rival  to  man  in  his  ability  to  live  in  all  climates  and 
oat  all  foods.  He  goes  wherever  man  goes,  living  on  a  diet  of 
meat  and  fish  if  upon  the  shores  of  the  Arctic  Sea,  corn  pone  and 
persimmons  in  Georgia,  beans  and  bananas  mixed  with  a  .little 
meat  in  equatorial  Africa.  As  a  draft  animal  he  is  to  the  snowy 
parts  of  North  America  what  the  reindeer  is  to  Lapland.  He 
draws  the  sledge  of  the  Aleut  and  the  Eskimo,  the  Hudson  Bay 
fur  trader,  the  explorer  of  the  Barren  Grounds,  beyond  Hudson 
Bay,  and  the  gold  prospector  of  Alaska  and  the  Klondike.  He 
performs  the  same  service  in  some  of  the  colder  parts  of  Europe 
and  Asia,  but  probably  is  most  used  in  the  densely  peopled  agri- 
cultural regions  of  northwestern  Europe.  In  the  north  of  France, 
Holland,  Belgium,  and  western  Germany,  regions  where  the  horse 
predominates,  it  has  long  been  common  to  see  a  team  of  two, 
three,  or  four  muscular  dogs  hitched  to  a  surprisingly  heavy  cart, 
taking  to  market  a  load  of  milk,  vegetables,  or  other  farm  prod- 
ucts. It  is  not  uncommon  to  see  a  peasant  woman  on  one  side 


THE  WORK  DOG 


211 


of  the  wagon  tongue  and  the  dog  on  the  other.  This  hard  labor 
is  due  to  poverty,  and  the  poverty  is  due  to  the  density  of 
population,  which  leaves  only  a  small  patch  of  land  for  each 
family,  so  that  they  cannot  feed  any  larger  work  animal  than 
the  dog.  In  parts  of  Germany  the  pet  dog  has  been  heavily 
taxed,  but  the  work  dog  has  been  left  untaxcd.  In  Japan,  where 


Flo.  72. — In  densely  peopled  Saxony  the  peasant  women  and  the  dog  are 
draft  animals.     Factory  labor  is  abundant. 

the  population  is  still  greater  in  proportion  to  resources,  man  is 
of  necessity  his  own  beast  of  burden,  using  wheelbarrows,  hand- 
carts, or  a  pole  with  two  burdens  balanced  across  hi.s  shoulders. 


liROUP  II.      THE  DRAFT  ANIMALS  OP  SPECIAL  LOCATION 

The  five  draft  animals  of  special  location  are  in  most  respects 
inferior  to  the  horse  and  the  mule,  but  have  some  peculiar  adapta- 
tion to  environment  that  enables  them  to  work  in  places  where 
the  horse  and  mule  are  less  efficient,  or  unable  to  survive. 

1.  THE  REINDEER.  The  reindeer  is  a  specialist  in  surviving 
cold  and  a  poor  diet,  such  as  the  moss  which  grows  on  the  other- 
wise bare  ground  of  some  almost  continually  frozen  arctic  plains, 


212         THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD   SUPPLY 

called  tundras.  Over  this  bleak,  treeless,  and  uninviting  Arctic 
region  the  caribou  and  other  species  of  the  reindeer  family  are 
widely  distributed.  Two  domesticated  kinds  of  reindeer  are  used 
by  the  sparse  population  from  the  Atlantic  Ocean  in  north  Nor- 
way to  Kamchatka  and  Bering  Straits  on  the  Pacific ;  the  south- 
ern limit  in  central  Asia  reaches  almost  to  the  Amur  Kiver  and 
Lake  Baikal.  In  this  vast  region,  where  the  population  is  very 
sparse,  the  inhabitants  use  the  reindeer  chiefly  as  a  sled  animal, 
although  they  occasionally  ride  him.  Reindeer  are  essential  to 
the  life  of  many  of  these  people:  for  in  addition  to  acting  as 
beasts  of  burden,  they  furnish  milk,  skins,  and  meat  to  the  herds- 
men, who  count  them  as  their  sole  wealth.  The  recent  introduc- 
tion of  reindeer  into  Alaska  and  Labrador,  countries  similar  to 
the  land  of  their  origin,  has  met  with  success;  their  number  in 
Alaska  has  rapidly  increased,  and  in  a  short  time  they  will  prob- 
ably be  distributed  throughout  the  arctic  and  sub-arctic  regions 
of  North  America.  The  first  commercial  shipment  of  reindeer 
meat  reached  Seattle  from  Alaska  about  1912. 

2.  THE  YAK.     The  yak,  a  close  cousin  to  the  ox  and  the  buf- 
falo, is  a  native  of  the  Himalaya  mountain  regions  and  is  adapted 
to  high  elevations,  scanty  food,  and  especially  to  deep  snow. 
The  under  parts  of  his  body  have  long  thick  hair  reaching  nearly 
to  the  ground,  so  that  he  can  lie  on  this  natural  mattress  with 
warmth  and  comfort  on  the  deep  snows  of  high  mountains.    This 
animal  is  at  present  used  only  in  Tibet  and  the  adjacent  high 
regions  of  central  Asia,  where  he  draws  carts  and  carries  burdens 
on  his  back.     Mr.  Ernest  Thompson-Seton,  the  naturalist,' has 
pointed  out  that  large  areas  of  Canada,  not  well  suited  to  ordi- 
nary cattle,  might  well  be  given  over  to  yak  pasturage.     The 
yak  has  shown  his  fitness  by  thriving  for  six  generations  in  an 
English  park. 

3.  THE  LLAMA.     The  llama  of  the  highlands  of  Peru  and 
Bolivia  performs,  though  less  adequately,  in  the  Andean  region 
the  service  rendered  by  the  yak  in  the  Himalayas.    The  llama  is 
a  small  animal  resembling  both  the  sheep  and  the  camel,  and 
is  used  only  for  carrying  packs  not  exceeding  a  hundred  pounds 
in  weight.     He  does  not  have  to  contend  with  much  snow,  but 
for    sure-footedness    in    climbing    the    exceedingly    precipitous 
Andean  heights  the  llama  has  no  superior;  however,  his  great- 


MINOR  DRAFT  ANIMALS  213 

est  advantage  is  his  camel-like  ability  to  pick  his  living  where 
the  picking  is  poor.  It  is  possible  that  the  llama,  as  well  as  the 
yak,  might  be  profitable  in  other  mountainous  regions.  He  has, 
however,  two  habits  that  do  not  endear  him.  If  his  load  does 
not  suit  him  he  will  lie  down,  and  you  may  beat  him  to  death 
before  he  will  move.  If  he  dislikes  you  he  may  at  any  time  spit 
in  your  face. 

4.  THE  CAMEL.     The  camel  is  well  known  as  a  specialist  in 
surviving  in  comfort  for  several  days  without  food  or  water, 
and  living  upon  the  harsh  vegetation  of  the  desert.     From  un- 
known antiquity  this  animal  has  been  distributed  from  the  west- 
ern Sahara  through  Africa,  Arabia,  and  central  Asia  to  eastern 
Mongolia,  and  has  lately  been  introduced  into  the  Australian 
desert.     There  are  two  kinds,   the  one-humped  and   the  two- 
humped  or  Bactrian  camel.     The  latter  is  found  all  the  way 
from  the  Crimea  in  southern  Russia  to  Pekin,  and  from  the 
trans-Siberian  railroad  to  northern  India,  where  it  crosses  the 
territory  of  the  yak.     Without  the  camel  many  parts  of  the 
desert  region  of  Asia  and  Africa  could  not  be  inhabited  and 
many  deserts  over  which  caravans  have  passed  for  ages  could 
not  be  crossed.     The  largest  heavy  draft  camel  can  slowly  carry 
a  pack  of  from  700  to  1,000  pounds,  the  fastest  saddle  animals 
can  take  a  man  a  hundred  miles  a  day;  and  they  can  carry 
these  burdens  for  several  days,  living  the  while  upon  the  ac- 
cumulated fat  which  has  been  stored  in  the  humps  on  their 
backs.     This  storage  of  energy  in  the  camel's  hump  is  like  that 
accumulated  by  the  pig  and  the  bear  in  autumn  to  enable  them 
to  lie  for  days  contentedly  in  their  beds  when  the  winter  season 
makes  hunting  for  food  difficult.     The  camel,  on  the  contrary, 
uses  his  surplus  to  carry  him  over  a  hard  region  rather  than  a 
hard  season.     One  attempt  was  made  to  introduce  the  camel  into 
the  southwestern  part  of  the  United  States,  but  it  was  inter- 
rupted by  the  Civil  War.    There  is  no  apparent  reason  why  he 
should  not  thrive  and  be  useful  there,  as  in  Australia. 

5.  THE  ELEPHANT.    The  elephant  has  a  restricted  field  of  use- 
fulness because  he  lives  only  in  the  tropical  forest  regions  of 
Asia  and  Africa.     He  is  an  enormous  feeder,  eating  in  propor- 
tion to  his  weight  more  food  than  any  of  the  other  work  animals, 
so  that  he  can  be  used  only  where  the  humid  tropic  climate 


.214         THE  BASIS  OF  WESTERN  FOOD  SUPPLY 

makes  forage  most  abundant.  Only  Asiatics  have  been  energetic- 
enough  to  domesticate  him  in  modern  times.  Many  of  the  work 
elephants  are  caught  wild  in  the  forests,  and  then,  with  the 
assistance  of  tame  elephants,  are  laboriously  broken  to  do  the 
work  of  man.  They  draw  plows  and  wagons  and  carry  pas- 
sengers on  their  backs,  but  are  most  useful  in  lumber  yards, 
where  with  great  skill  and  dexterity  these  live  cranes  lift  and 
pile  logs  which  a  dozen  men  would  have  difficulty  in  handling. 
In  times  of  war  they  have  even  carried,  lifted,  and  placed  cannon 
for  artillery  regiments,  and  arc  a  regular  part  of  the  British 
army  equipment  in  India. 

Two  thousand  years  ago  the  Carthaginian  armies  invaded 
Roman  territory  with  war  elephants.  Today  the  African  ele- 
phant is  wild,  and  is  pursued  with  relentless  vigor  into  ever 
farther  fastnesses  and  slaughtered  at  the  rate  of  sixty  thousand 
per  year ;  his  extermination  is  threatened  for  the  sake  of  his 
valuable  ivory.  In  this  region,  where  none  of  the  other  do- 
mestic animals  can  live  because  of  climatic  conditions  and  where 
land  transportation  of  necessity  falls  upon  the  backs  of  men,  it 
seems  that  the  moderns,  if  possessed  of  any  spark  of  apprecia- 
tion for  resources,  might  copy  the  good  work  of  the  ancients, 
rctame  the  native  elephant,  and  give  to  central  Africa  the  most 
powerful  of  all  beasts  of  burden  where  it  now  has  only  the  least 
efficient — man. 

Parts  of  Africa  have  some  hope  of  acquiring  a  beast  of  burden 
as  a  result  of  probable  climatic  fitness  of  a  new  hybrid,  the 
zulebra,  a  cross  between  the  horse  or  ass,  and  the  zebra — an 
equine  that  resembles  the  horse  quite  as  closely  as  does  the  ass. 
The  African  tsetse  fly  kills  all  the  domesticated  equines,  but  four 
species  of  zebra  are  native  and  immune — possible  bases  for  the 
production  of  an  efficient  new  work  animal.  Several  million 
square  miles  of  middle  Africa  are  sadly  in  need  of  this  animal, 
of  which  a  small  number  has  already  been  produced. 

Undoubtedly  the  world's  food  supply  may  be  materially  in- 
creased if  man  will  devote  as  much  time  and  thought  to  the  pro- 
duction of  better  work  animals  as  he  has  expended  on  the  pro- 
duction of  race  horses.  The  great  land  reserve  of  the  world  is  in 
the  tropics,  where  agriculture  must  await  the  coming  of  good 
work  animals.  It  is  true  that  the  farm  tractor  is  on  the  way,  but 


AUTO  AND  BEAST  215 

it  lias  less  prospect  of  displacing  the  work  animal  in  food  pro- 
duction than  the  automobile  has  of  driving  the  work  horse  off 
the  road.  Up  to  the  present  time  the  automobile  has  been  sup- 
plementary to  the  horse,  and  despite  the  fact  that  the  horse- 
power of  automobiles  in  North  America  far  exceeds  the  actual 
number  of  horses,  this  increase  represents,  not  substitution,  but 
merely  an  increase  of  wealth  and  power.  The  total  number  of 
horses  has  increased  from  21,040,000  in  1910  to  21,563,000  in 
1918.  The  same  relation  of  engine  to  beast  will  probably  prevail 
on  the  great  plains  of  Brazil,  Venezuela,  Bolivia,  Sudan,  equa- 
torial Africa,  and  other  unused  tropic  lands  after  we  have  suc- 
ceeded in  putting  to  work  tame  African  elephants  and  new 
crosses  of  the  zebra  and  other  animals  on  these  now  unused  bil- 
lions of  acres. 


CHAPTER  X 
THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

CATTLE  ON  THE  FRONTIER 

THE  world's  beef  supply  is  furnished  in  part  by  the  fat  cow 
after  she  has  served  her  time  as  a  milk  producer.  The  beef  is 
then  only  a  by-product  of  the  dairy  industry.  The  beef  in- 
dustry proper  depends  on  steers  raised  for  their  meat  only, 
and  is  rarely  followed  on  a  dairy  farm  or  in  dairy  regions. 
The  steer  is  a  far  less  efficient  utilizer  of  food  than  the  cow 
with  her  rich  product  of  milk.  (See  table  of  acre  yields, 
p.  182.)  He  is  a  less  efficient  meat  producer  than  the  sheep, 
which  has  also  the  additional  harvest  of  wool.  Nevertheless  he 
is  one  of  the  most  widely  distributed  of  domestic  animals. 
Wherever  there  are  wide  spaces  of  untilled  grass  lands  we  are 
likely  to  find  cattle.  They  are  the  advance  guard  of  production 
for  world  trade.  They  were  pioneers  during  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury upon  the  vast  plains  that  the  white  man  won  from  the  wild 
animals  and  defenseless  natives  in  North  America,  South  Amer- 
ica, Australia,  and  central  Asia.  On  account  of  their  size, 
strength,  and  speed,  they  can  combat  dangers,  or,  if  necessary, 
flee  from  them.  Their  ability  to  withstand  heat  and  moisture 
has  enabled  them  to  thrive  in  lower  latitudes  and  wetter  climates 
than  sheep.  With  the  exception  of  the  humid  plains  of  the 
Amazon  and  central  Africa  and  a  few  places  in  the  Oriental 
tropics,  they  are  to  be  found  from  the  Straits  of  Magellan  to 
Hudson  Bay  in  the  Americas,  and  from  Tasmania  to  Kamchatka 
and  Finland  in  the  Old  World. 

In  the  first  stage  of  the  occupation  of  new  plains,  before  trans- 
portation has  been  well  developed,  the  only  export  products 
cattle  can  furnish  are  the  non-perishable  hides  and  tallow.  Fifty 
years  ago  the  half-breed  Indians  and  a  few  white  men  on  the 
plains  of  Argentina  were  producing  these  commodities  at  the 

216 


THE  WORLD'S  CATTLE 


217 


218  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

same  time  that  the  American  Indian  and  frontiersmen  were  kill- 
ing buffaloes  (bison)  for  their  hides  upon  the  great  American 
Plains  reaching  from  southern  Texas  to  Lake  Winnipeg  and 
beyond.  This  vast  plain  of  North  America  was  a  splendid  pas- 
ture and  had  been  occupied  by  the  bison,  a  close  relative  of  the 
ox,  for  an  incalculable  period  of  time.  These  animals  wintered 
in  the  warm  lands  from  Oklahoma  to  Mexico  and  each  spring 
went  north  across  what  is  now  northern  Texas,  western  Kansas, 
Nebraska,  the  Dakotas,  and  on  into  Canada.  With  the  approach 
of  winter  they  migrated  south,  the  herds  often  covering  the 
plains  for  miles  in  such  great  numbers  that  they  actually  stopped 
the  progress  of  trains  when  the  first  railroad  was  built  across  the 
plains  from  Omaha  in  1868.  This  railroad  brought  to  the  bison 
his  doom.  In  the  next  four  years,  many  millions  were  slain  for 
sport  or  for  their  skins,  or  from  the  sheer  desire  to  kill.  Men 
with  high-power  rifles  fired  into  herds  of  bison  from  passing 
trains,  and  now  this  splendid  animal  is  practically  extinct, 
except  for  a  few  herds  in  National  Parks,  private  reserves, 
and  zoological  gardens.  There  is  still  one  small  wild  herd  of 
perhaps  three  hundred  animals  that  have  escaped  slaughter  by 
fleeing  to  the  inhospitable  region  around  Great  Slave  Lake, 
and  staying  there.*  The  bison's  place  on  the  plains  was 
promptly  taken  by  the  long-horned  Texas  cattle  which  had 
run  wild  with  him  for  the  three  centuries  since  their  ancestors 
had  escaped  from  the  early  Spanish  settlers.  While  living  with 
the  buffalo  on  the  plains  they  had  become  well  adjusted  to  the 
conditions  of  life  there.  Their  long  horns  furnished  admirable 
defense  against  wolves  and  bears,  their  long  legs  and  muscular 
bodies  were  efficient  in  flight.  But  they  were  not  very  good  for 
beef,  and  consequently  have  been  improved  almost  completely 
out  of  existence  by  crossing  with  better  breeds  brought  from 
England. 

• 

CATTLE  ON  THE  GREAT  PLAINS  OF  NORTH  AMERICA 

The  large  open  plain  west  of  the  one  hundredth  meridian  in 
central  North  America,  has  remained  a  great  cattle  range.  It 

*  Tin;  interest  of  constructive  zoologists  is  at  last  being  given  to  the 
scattered  bison  remnants.  They  are  increasing  and  may  yet  become  a 
breed  of  commercial  cattle. 


CATTLE,  LAND,  MEN 

is  too  dry  for  good  farming  of  the  kind  to  which  we  have  long 
been  accustomed ;  therefore  the  pioneer  farmer  could  not  take  it, 
as  he  took  all  Iowa  and  the  eastern  parts  of  Kansas  and  Nebraska. 
The  United  States  Government,  which  owned  the  land,  would  not 
sell  it,  for  fear  of  great  estates  and  land  monopolies.  Although 
it  was  excellent  pasture  for  a  few  cattle  per  square  mile,  no  one 
could  afford  to  take  it  even  as  a  gift,  under  the  homestead  law 
which  gave  one  hun- 
dred and  sixty  acres 
to  each  settler,  but 
limited  his  acquisi- 
tion to  that  amount 
and  required  that  he 
live  on  his  holding. 
In  a  land  fit  only 
for  scanty  pasture,  a 
man  needs  hundreds 
of  acres.  So  this  vast 
area  of  the  plains, 
larger  than  any  Eu- 
ropean country  ex- 
cept Russia,  remained 
every  man's  land, 
as  the  government 
would  not  sell,  give 
away,  or  lease  it  so  that  it  could  be  fenced  off  in  square  leagues 
after  the  fashion  of  Texas  with  its  great  Spanish  grants.  So 
the  owner  branded  his  cattle,  turned  them  out  upon  the  plain 
in  great  numbers,  and  then,  after  an  annual  round-up  when  all 
the  cattle  in  a  large  area  were  brought  together,  each  man  took 
the  cattle  that  had  his  brand  and  sold  them.  When  the  cow 
was  lassoed  and  dragged  from  the  herd,  her  young  calf  fol- 
lowed her,  to  receive  his  master's  brand  and  be  turned  loose 
until  he  in  his  turn  was  harvested  one,  two,  or  three  years  later. 
This  was  a  very  cheap  way  to  raise  cattle  and  very  profitable 
for  the  cattle  companies.  It  made  cheap  beef  for  market  and, 
along  with  the  settlement  of  new  corn  lands  further  east,  it  led 
to  the  high  figures  for  animals  shown  in  the  table  of  animals 
in  relation  to  population  on  p.  221.  The  freedom  of  the  range 


LEADING  COUNTRIES 

MILLIONS    OF    CATTLE 
10     20     SO    40      50     80     70      80     9O    100   110 

UNITED  STATES  
RUSSIA  _.  ....... 

ARGENTINA  ...  -- 

•••• 
•••• 
•i 
•••• 

—  • 
— 
• 
• 

AUSTRIA  -HUNGARY  

UNITED  KINGDOM  

LEADING  COUNTRIES 

NUMBER    PER    1000    POPULA 
2000                    4000                     «( 

r  ON 

100 

PARAGUAY.  —        

BECMUANALANOfPROT  .>  U" 

=±r 

AUSTRALIA                      -. 
NEW   2CALAND  

_^_ 

UNITED  STATES  

LEADING  COUNTRIES 
NETHERLANDS  

2 

N<j 
1 

MBER    F 
60           1 

ER    SQL 
5           10 

ARE 

•j 

Ml 
l?« 

.E 

1 

SO 

BELGIUM     .__.. 

URUGUAY  ...... 
TURKEY  (EUROPEAN).. 

GERMANY  
SWITZERLAND  

UNITED    STATES  

Fio.  74. — It  is  interesting  to  study  the 
place  of  the  United  States  in  these  graphs. 
( Finch  and  Baker. ) 


220  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

naturally  led  to  overstocking.  It  is  to  be  noted  that  sheep,  which 
can  crop  the  grass  closer  than  cattle,  have  in  places  superseded 
the  cattle,  and  the  sheep  have  in  turn  been  crowded  out  by 
goats,  which  can  crop  even  closer  than  the  sheep.  The  grass, 
especially  in  periods  of  drought,  was  eaten  so  close  that  it  could 
not  produce  seed,  and  in  many  places  it  died  out.  As  a  result, 
the  plains  now  support  twenty-five  per  cent,  fewer  cattle  than 
formerly,  and  are  being  greatly  injured  by  both  wind  and  water 
erosion  and  by  the  advance  of  weeds  which  no  animal  can  eat. 
The  care  of  the  government  range  lands  is  one  of  the  tasks  in 
which  the  United  States  greatly  needs  a  more  sensible  policy. 
Careful  pasturing,  with  opportunity  for  the  grass  to  seed  itself, 
has  resulted  in  marked  increase  of  output  in  places  where  it 
has  been  tried. 

A  similar  policy  on  all  the  range  now  open  would  doubtless 
increase  our  meat  supply  by  several  million  head  of  cattle,  but 
the  difficulties  of  applying  a  scientific  policy  have  thus  far  been 
too  great  for  that  awkward  body  of  not  too^  highly  intelligent 
politicians,  the  American  Congress.  The  homesteader  fears  the 
land  monopolist  so  much  that  he  steadily  votes  against  even  a 
leasing  policy.  The  poor  man  is  also  against  the  leasing  policy 
because  he  fears  that  the  rich  man  will  lease  all  the  land  and  put 
him  out.  Thus  the  range  goes  from  bad  to  worse.  But  plainly 
a  good  leasing  policy  is  much  better  than  the  present  scheme,  so 
far  as  the  meat  supply  and  the  care  of  land  are  concerned.  It 
is  also  doubtless  better  for  society  than  granting  permanent  pos- 
session of  great  areas.  The  size  of  the  farm  necessary  to  support 
a  family  can  be  better  appreciated  when  we  know  that  some  of 
the  range  in  New  Mexico  (Jornada,  on  Rio  Grande,  fifty  miles 
from  the  Mexican  boundary)  requires  sixty  acres  to  support  a 
steer.  Thus  a  farm  of  fifty  cattle  would  need  nearly  five  square 
miles — as  much  land  as  in  the  fields  of  Japan  supports  thirteen 
thousand  people. 


CATTLE,  LAND,  MEN 


221 


10-20 


JO-30 


30-40 


over  40 


Fro.  75. — Cattle  per  square  mile  in  the  United  States  by  statee, 
January  1,  1918. 


Leas 
than  10 


10-30 


60-100     100-150     150-200      200-300      over  300 


FIG.  76. — Cattle  per  one  hundred  inhabitants  in  the  United  States, 
January  1,  1918. 


222  THE   DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

THE    MIGRATION    AND    SHIPMENT    OF   BEEF    CATTLE 

The  range  cattle  spend  one,  two,  or  three  years  on  their  native 
plain,  living  on  grass,  and  are  then  shipped  into  the  corn-belt, 
where  the  farmers  keep  them  for  a  few  months,  fattening  them 
on  corn,  corn  fodder,  hay,  and  cottonseed  meal  before  sending 
them  off  to  the  great  markets  for  slaughter.  Some  of  these  cattle 
are  fattened  on  the  farms  of  Pennsylvania  and  other  eastern 
states,  as  many  as  sixty  thousand  a  year  being  distributed  at  the 
city  of  Lancaster,  Pennsylvania,  among  the  fertile  and  well- 
cared-for  farms  of  that  district,  where,  en  route  to  the  shambles, 
they  pause  and  fatten  themselves,  converting  all  the  roughage  of 
the  farm  into  great  heaps  of  manure  for  the  fattening  of  grain 
and  tobacco  fields.  To  a  smaller  extent  this  same  process  of  emi- 
gration is  repeated  in  the  Southern  highlands.  In  the  hilly  coun- 
try of  southwestern  Virginia,  northeastern  Tennessee  and  West 
Virginia,  there  is  a  section  of  good  grass  country  where  young 
cattle  are  raised  and  sent  to  the  farm  lands  of  the  Shenandoah 
Valley  and  the  Piedmont  sections  of  Virginia  and  Maryland  for 
fattening.  This  movement  of  the  cattle  from  the  range  country 
to  the  land  of  better  forage  is  more  or  less  world-wide,  for  every 
continent  has  some  dry  range  which  produces  lean  cattle  easily, 
but  fat  cattle  with  great  difficulty. 

A  spectacular  example  of  migration  of  animals  is  the  sea 
journey  each  year  of  half  a  million  lean  Icelanders  to  the 
United  Kingdom.  Another  is  found  in  the  southern  part  of  the 
Andean  region  where  Argentine  cattle  cross  a  corner  of  the 
Bolivian  high  plains  to  reach  their  market  in  the  mining  camps 
of  the  Chilean  nitrate  works  on  the  western  sides  of  the  moun- 
tains. This  is  a  fearful  journey  for  the  poor  beasts,  who  must 
travel  for  three  days  and  nights  without  food  or  water  across 
deserts,  high  plains,  and  mountain  passes  that  are  freezing  cold 
at  night.  But  they  cost  no  freight  charges. 

Irrigation  in  the  American  West  is  important  to  the  cattle 
industry.  Beef  is  the  chief  commodity  shipped  from  most  of 
the  irrigated  districts  of  the  United  States  and  Canada,  and 
alfalfa,  the  chief  irrigated  crop,  is  the  finest  of  forage.  For- 
tunately for  our  beef  supply,  the  irrigable  valleys  suitable  for 
the  growth  of  alfalfa  are  widely  scattered  throughout  the  cattle 


REFRIGERATION 


223 


range  from  Canada  to  Mexico,  and  from  western  Kansas  to 
western  Oregon,  so  that  these  alfalfa  fields  are  really  scattered 
oases  in  the  scanty  and  semi-arid  pastures.  During  winter  and 
the  seasons  of  drought,  alfalfa  hay  supplies  the  cattle  from  the 
ranges  with  abundant  food  and  fattens  them  for  market. 

During  the  last  thirty-five  years  there  have  been  great  im- 
provements in  the  handling  and  marketing  of  meat.     Formerly 


STEERS    AND    BULLS 
NUMBER.  1910 


FIG.  77. — Distribution  of  cattle   in   the    United   States — the   most  widely 
distributed  of  our  meat  animals.      (Finch  and  Baker.) 

live  cattle  were  carried  in  trains  from  Kansas  to  Chicago,  and 
on  to  New  York  and  Boston  for  slaughtering  to  supply  the  East- 
ern market.  About  1874  we  began  to  ship  live  cattle  to  Europe. 
In  normal  times  sorae-of  this  long-distance  movement  of  animals 
still  continues,  on  account  of  the  preference  of  the  British  for 
beef  slaughtered  in  their  own  country.  Steamers  from  Boston, 
New  York,  Philadelphia,  Baltimore,  and  Montreal  annually  con- 
veyed thousands  of  live  cattle  to  Great  Britain.  They  were  at 
times  even  taken  alive  from  Argentina  to  England.  It  is,  how- 
ever, much  more  expensive  to  transport  live  animals  than 
slaughtered  ones,  because  the  animals  occupy  more  space  alive 
than  dead,  some  die  on  the  way,  all  must  be  fed,  and  they  always 
lose  weight.  The  dangers  and  hardships  result  in  such  losses 


224  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

that  hogs  are  not  exported  alive  at  all,  and  sheep  only  in  small 
numbers.  Much  more  important  is  the  shipment  of  chilled  and 
frozen  meat,  which  has  been  an  important  factor  in  revolu- 
tionizing the  meat  trade  of  the  world.* 

THE  EFFECT  OF  IMPROVED  METHODS  OF  SHIPPING  AND  PRESERVING 

MEAT 

The  invention  of  artificial  refrigeration  has  done  much  to  make 
possible  the  slaughtering  of  animals  near  the  place  where  they 
are  raised.  About  1875  the  refrigerator  car  made  it  possible  to 
send  dressed  beef  from  Chicago  to  Boston  more  cheaply  than  the 
live  animals  could  be  sent.  In  1879  was  discovered  a  sure  method 
of  hermetically  sealing  meat  in  cans  so  that  it  would  keep  for  a 
long  period,  which  gave  further  incentive  to  locate  the  slaughter- 
ing industry  at  the  great  cattle  markets  rather  than  at  the  con- 
suming markets.  Attempts,  however,  to  operate  packing  plants 
upon  the  Great  Plains  where  the  cattle  themselves  are  produced 
have  resulted  in  failure,  on  account  of  the  lack  of  a  market  for 
many  of  the  by-products  and  less  desirable  portions  of  meat, 
which  the  varied  market  of  a  large  city  will  consume.  Conse- 
quently, packing  plants  are  located  in  the  great  city  nearest  to 
the  places  where  the  cattle  are  fattened.  Cincinnati  and  Chi- 
cago were  the  first  packing-house  centers,  but  Omaha,  Kansas 
City,  and,  to  a  lesser  extent,  Minneapolis,  have  now  become  great 
centers.  Plants  have  been  established  also  at  Fort  Worth  and 
Waco  in  northern  Texas,  but  Chicago  is  yet,  as  it  has  long  been, 
the  greatest  meat-packing  center  in  the  world.  With  the  assist- 
ance of  these  two  great  storage  devices,  refrigeration  and  can- 
ning, a  world  trade  in  meat  has  developed,  so  that  the  inhabi- 
tants of  Boston  or  London  have  become  almost  as  dependent 
upon  cities  hundreds  and  even  thousands  of  miles  away  for  their 
meat  as  they  have  upon  other  cities  for  their  bread.  In  1913 
London  had  storage  for  865,000  carcasses  of  beef. 

During  the  year  1913  the  United  Kingdom  imported  more  than 
9,000,000  cwts.  of  beef,  by  far  the  greater  proportion  of  which  was 
chilled,  and  nearly  5,500,000  cwts.  of  mutton,  practically  the  whole 

*  At  present  the  quarters  of  beef  are  carefully  stripped  from  the  bone 
and  sent  boneless  across  the  Atlantic,  to  a  great  saving  of  space. 


THE  STORING  OF  MEATS  225 

of  which  was  frozen.  To  this  must  be  added  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
rabbits  from  Australia,  fresh  fruit  from  Canada,  South  America,  and 
South  Africa,  milk  from  France  and  Holland,  cream  from  France, 
and  fish  from  British  trawlers  which  had  spent  a  month  or  six  weeks 
at  sea.  Such  food-supplies  are  rendered  possible,  not  only  by  re- 
frigerating machinery  on  ships,  but  also  by  cold  stores  on  land,  which 
enable  perishable  commodities  to  be  kept  until  they  are  required.  They 
avoid  waste  by  rendering  it  unnecessary  to  destroy  food  or  to  sell  it 
at  a  loss;  they  prevent  shortage;  they  maintain  prices  at  a  more  uni- 
form level,  and,  by  preventing  fluctuations,  they  contribute  towards  the 
stability  of  trade.* 

The  war  shut  off  temporarily  much  of  the  British  meat  import 
and  reduced  the  consumption,  but  with  no  injury  to  the  welfare 
of  the  people. 

THE  PACKING  INDUSTRY 

The  modern  meat-packing  plant,  handling  cattle,  hogs,  or 
sheep,  according  to  the  demands  of  the  market,  is  one  of  the 
most  wonderful  existing  examples  of  speed,  mechanical  perfec- 
tion, and  the  use  of  by-products.  A  procession  of  live  animals 
goes  through  a  gate  and  in  a  few  seconds  their  lifeless  bodies 
are  hanging  on  a  little  trolley  on  which  they  travel  past  a  long 
row  of  men,  each  of  whom  has  his  special  work  to  do.  In  a 
surprisingly  short  time  every  particle  of  the  animals  has  been 
taken  for  its  particular  use  and  the  chief  part  of  the  carcass  has 
been  rolled  into  the  cold-storage  room.  So  perfect  is  the  utili- 
zation of  the  refuse  that  absolutely  nothing  is  wasted.  Bones 
are  made  into  knife  handles  and  buttons,  and  the  small  pieces 
and  chippings  are  ground  for  fertilizer;  the  hair  goes  for  mat- 
tresses and  plastering;  the  intestines  for  sausage  casings;  the 
hoofs  are  made  into  gelatine  and  glue.  Even  the  blood  is  used 
for  buttons  and  other  industrial  purposes.  The  total  number  of 
inedible  products  of  an  animal  is  over  one  hundred.  Grease  not 
fit  for  culinary  use  is  made  into  soap.  All  other  parts  not  other- 
wise used  go  for  fertilizer.  The  meat  products  of  the  packing 
house  go  out  as  fresh,  salt,  smoked,  canned,  and  pickled  meat. 

The  packing  plant,  with  its  numerous  products  and  the  means 
of  selling  them,  has  rapidly  developed  into  one  of  the  most  aston- 

*  Cressy,  Edward:  Outline  of  Industrial  History,  p.  75. 


226  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

ishing  industrial  units  that  world  industry  has  thus  far  pro- 
duced. Three  or  four  American  companies  constitute  what  is 
commonly  called  a  meat  trust,  and  from  time  to  time  are  of- 
ficially so  declared  by  some  United  States  Government  investi- 
gators. In  a  booklet  put  out  in  their  own  defense,  Armour  & 
Company,  the  largest  firm  of  this  group,  maintain  that  in  the 
year  3916  they  produced  three  thousand  different  articles,  includ- 
ing grape  juice,  fertilizer,  leather,  banjo  strings,  evaporated 
milk,  and  Hawaiian  canned  pineapples.  They  reported : 

Total  number  of  employees 45,000 

Number  of  killing  plants   16 

Number  of  branch  houses  416 

Ground  area  all  plants  (acres)    500 

Floor  area  all  plants   (square  feet)    20,000,000 

Number  of  fertilizer  plants 36 

Refrigeration  capacity,  all  plants  (tons  per  day)    ..  17,126 

Tons  of  coal  consumed  annually   785,183 

Barrels  of  oil  consumed  as  fuel  annually  715,215 

Tons  of  salt  used  annually  90,000 

Pounds  of  sugar  used  annually   900,000 

Their  enormous  growth  and  the  taking  over  of  many  industries 
has  been  quite  natural.  Thus,  having  refrigerator  cars  for  their 
meat,  they  were  in  a  position  to  handle  a  few  carloads  of  fruit 
now  and  then ;  they  therefore  went  into  the  fresh  fruit  business, 
then  into  the  fresh  vegetable  business,  then  into  the  canned  vege- 
table business,  then  they  naturally  became  dealers  in  and  manu- 
facturers of  many  other  kinds  of  food.  Producing  two  or  three 
of  the  raw  materials  for  fertilizer,  it  was  natural  that  they 
should  buy  other  raw  materials  and  make  a  complete  fertilizer, 
then  a  list  of  fertilizers.  And  so  they  have  grown  *  until  their 
activities  include  a  great  variety  of  products  that  in  some  way 
were  allied  to  some  of  the  articles  made  in  the  careful  utiliza- 
tion of  all  the  waste  and  minor  products  of  the  slaughtered 
animal. 

Owing  to  the  development  of  cold-storage  and  refrigerator 

*  An  article  in  the  New  York  Journal,  of  Commerce,  12/13/18,  said  that 
the  packers  in  Chicago  control  salmon  canneries  on  the  Pacific  Coast,  milk 
condcnscries  in  the  dairy-belt,  gave  an  order  for  800  cars  of  raisins  in 
the  summer  of  1018,  and  are  said  to  control  25  per  cent,  of  important 
canned  goods  trade. 


THE  FRESH  MEAT  TRADE          227 

cars,  an  ever-increasing  proportion  of  fresh  meat  is  now  dis- 
tributed from  the  great  packing  centers  to  cities  and  small  towns, 
chiefly  in  the  northeastern  part  of  the  United  States.  It  is  also 
regularly  put  into  the  chilled  chambers  of  the  ocean  steamers 
at  the  Atlantic  ports,  and  sent  to  Liverpool,  London,  Antwerp, 
and  Hamburg  to  feed  the  dense  populations  of  Europe.  Pork  is 
exported  to  the  West  Indian  Islands  and  other  tropical  countries. 
For  this  trade  pork  has  the  advantage  of  being  relatively  cheap 
and  keeping  well.  Also  the  West  Indian  negro  is  content  with 
the  poorer  parts  of  the  animal. 

THE  EUROPEAN  CATTLE  INDUSTRY 

While  the  exportation  of  meat  and  by-products  to  western 
Europe  has  long  been  an  important  but  declining  part  of 
American  trade,  the  production  of  meat  in  Europe  is  much 
more  extensive.  The  total  number  of  cattle  in  the  United 
States,  Canada,  and  Mexico  before  the  war  was  eighty-three 
million ;  Europe  had  one  hundred  and  twenty-nine  million, 
but  not  enough  for  its  own  use.  The  herds  are  greatly  re- 
duced now  by  the  war.  In  many  sections  of  Europe  cattle  are 
normally  an  important  money  crop,  and,  as  in  America,  the 
outlying  districts  send  them  to  the  more  populous  regions; 
for  instance,  before  the  war  Hungary  and  Galicia  used  to  send 
stall- fattened  cattle  to  Switzerland.  Owing  to  the  heavy  rain- 
fall and  luxuriant  growth  of  grass,  Ireland  and  the  western  part 
of  England  before  the  war  were  very  important  cattle-raising 
districts  and  the  English  farmer  gloried  in  his  fine  fat  cattle. 
The  moist  low-lying  lands  along  the  Baltic  Sea  and  English 
Channel  are  admirably  located  for  the  production  of  grass  and 
the  keeping  of  cattle,  and  a  previous  discussion  has  pointed  out 
the  great  development  of  the  industry  there.  The  well-tilled 
north  of  France  possessed  many  cattle.  Denmark  is  a  model 
cattle  country  which  long  exported  beef  to  Great  Britain  before 
the  rise  of  the  more  intensive  dairy  industry.  The  upland  pas- 
tures of  southwestern  Germany  and  the  mountain  pastures  of 
the  Alps  are  also  famed  for  their  cattle.  Most  of  the  cattle  of 
western  Europe  live  in  barns  and  have  their  food  brought  to 
them  in  the  form  of  cultivated  crops,  which  are  more  productive 


228 


THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 


Percentage 


India  25.0 


United  States  13.8 


than  pastures.  In  a  day 's  railroad  journey  across  Germany  fifteen 
years  ago  I  saw  no  cattle  at  pasture  except  in  three  places,  and 
then  on  land  unsuited  to  the  plow.  The  same  conditions  prevailed 

in  France  and  Italy,  but  not  in  Eng- 
land, which,  at  the  beginning  of  the 
war,  was  neglecting  grain  growing  in 
the  interests  of  rare  roast  beef  and 
mutton  chops.  The  common  practice  of 
keeping  cattle  in  the  stable  and  carry- 
ing their  food  to  them  is  the  explana- 
tion of  the  larger  number  of  cattle  per 
square  mile  in  Europe  than  in  America. 
Russia,  the  greatest  cattle  country  in 
Europe,  and  the  second  in  the  world, 
has  vast  plains,  parts  of  which,  like 
those  of  our  Western  States,  are  too 
arid  for  any  use  save  as  pasture.  In 
eastern  Russia  there  are  districts  so  re- 
mote from  good  transportation  that 
cattle  are  kept  largely  for  their  hides 
and  tallow,  as  they  were  years  ago  in 
Argentina,  but  before  the  Great  War, 
the  building  of  railroads  was  fast  bring- 
ing this  epoch  to  a  close  there  as  in 
most  other  out-of-the-way  corners. 


European 
Russia 


8.5 


Brazil     7.0 


Argentina  6.8 

Germany  4.9 

Austria  4.1 

France  3.4 

Asiatic  Russia  3.4 

United  Kingdom  2.8 

Australia  2.6 


All  others  17.3 


Million 
Cattle 


106.0 


69.0 


36.2 

30.7 
29.0 

20.9 

17.7 
14.8 
14.6 
12.2 
11.4 


74.0 


CATTLE  IN   OLD  WORLD   ARID  BELT 


FIG.  78. — Distribution 
of  cattle  in  various 
countries,  1914. 


Countries  having  the  dry  summer 
of  the  Mediterranean  climate  do  not 
possess  good  pasture,  so  that  in  those 
countries  cattle  are  not  so  important 

as  in  northern  Europe.  In  the  dry  climate,  animals  better 
adapted  to  poor  herbage  such  as  the  sheep  and  goat, 
are  substituted  for  cattle  and  horses.  For  this  reason  Italy, 
Spain,  and  Portugal  have  fewer  cattle  than  Austria,  and 
Italy's  percentage  of  cattle  to  people  before  the  war  was  only 
seven.  Cattle  are,  nevertheless,  widely  distributed  in  the  arid 
region  and  are  to  be  found  in  limited  numbers  from  Spain  to 
Palestine,  Persia,  Turkestan,  and  Manchuria.  In  Mongolia  the 


THE  PERILS  OF  RANGE  CATTLE  229 

scanty  pastures  furnish  some  of  the  exports  of  the  Chinese 
Empire.  In  this  wide  zone  of  Mediterranean  climate  and  little 
rain,  which  finds  its  closest  counterpart  in  the  American  cattle 
ranges  between  the  Sierras  and  the  Rockies,  the  methods  and  the 
difficulties  of  the  industry  are  shown  by  the  following  excerpts 
from' a  United  States  Consular  Report  from  Harput,  Asia  Minor 
(June  17,  1911)  :  "A  great  portion  of  the  cattle,  sheep,  and 
goats  are  owned  by  nomad  tribes  of  Kurds  that  wander  about 
this  whole  country  with  their  flocks  and  herds.  This  last  winter, 
however,  was  the  most  severe  ever  known  in  this  country;  the 
snow  extended  south  even  down  into  the  sub-tropics,  and  over 
this  winter-grazing  land  the  snow  was  several  feet  deep  and 
lasted  throughout  the  entire  winter.  The  people  were  helpless 
to  provide  against  such  conditions.  There  was  no  food  procur- 
able for  the  livestock  and  little  for  the  inhabitants,  twenty  per 
cent,  of  whom  and  seventy  to  eighty  per  cent,  of  the  livestock 
starved  to  death."  Freezing  and  starving  are  by  no  means  un- 
common fates  for  cattle  in  the  United  States,  Canada,  and  other 
parts  of  the  world  where  men  try  to  make  them  live  through  the 
winter  without  stores  of  forage.  Irregularities  of  rainfall  are  as 
sure  as  rain  itself,  and  a  given  range  that  will  support  eighty 
cattle  this  year  may  support  one  hundred  next  year  and  seventy- 
five  the  year  after.  Returning  spring  often  finds  dead  cattle  on 
the  range  all  the  way  from  Texas  and  Arizona  to  Alberta. 

THE   CATTLE   INDUSTRY   OP  THE  SOUTH  TEMPERATE   ZONE 

The  refrigerator  ship,  the  refrigerator  car,  and  the  cold-storage 
plant  have  made  possible  the  carriage  of  meat  to  market  half- 
way around  the  world  and  more  if  need  should  arise,  so  that  the 
ranchers  of  the  south  temperate  zone  need  no  longer  keep  cattle 
for  their  hides  and  tallow  alone.  With  these  inventions  a  new 
prosperity  came  to  Argentina,  New  Zealand,  and  Australia — 
countries  admirably  adapted  to  pastoral  industries.  Packing 
plants  like  those  of  Chicago  and  Omaha  now  stand  at  Welling- 
ton, New  Zealand;  at  Sydney,  Brisbane,  and  other  places  in 
Australia;  at  Buenos  Ayres  and  Rosario,  in  Argentina;  and  at 
Paysandu  and  Fray  Bentos,  across  the  Plata  River  in  Uru- 
guay. From  these  plants,  the  frozen  carcasses  of  cattle 


230  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

and  sheep  are  wheeled  by  the  thousands  into  the  freezing 
chambers  of  the  ships  which  carry  them  across  the  entire  torrid 
zone  to  deliver  them,  still  frozen,  at  the  cold-storage  ware- 
houses of  Antwerp,  Southampton,  Liverpool,  London,  Glas- 
gow, Lisbon,  Naples,  Genoa.  Hence  they  are  distributed  to 
the  butchers'  carts  of  a  hundred  English  and  continental 
towns.  Although  this  method  insures  cheaper  food  to  the 
European  and  better  prices  to  the  farmer  of  the  south  tem- 
perate zone,  it  has  not  sufficed  to  keep  down  the  price  of  meat. 
The  high  price  of  meat  causes  marked  industrial  changes.  The 
Argentinians  now  pay  tremendous  prices  (at  times  over  $5,000 
per  animal)  for  prize-winning  breeding  stock  of  the  English 
cattle  shows  and  turn  them  out  to  increase  on  the  fine  level 
estancias  (ranches)  ;  they  fatten  the  progeny  of  these  animals 
on  the  alfalfa  which  is  becoming  so  important  a  crop  in  that 
country.  The  possibilities  of  the  extension  of  meat  production 
in  the  Parana  Valley  appear  to  be  very  great.  Alfalfa  has 
proved  to  be  especially  well  adapted  to  large  areas  and  its  use 
is  rapidly  spreading.  It  increases  from  three  to  six  fold  the 
number  of  cattle  that  the  land  will  support.  A  few  years  ago 
an  American,  writing  from  his  sixty-thousand-acre  alfalfa  ranch 
in  the  southern  part  of  the  province  of  Cordoba,*  said,  "  You 
can  buy  a  league  (6,672  acres)  for  $11,000  ($1.65  per  acre)  and, 
by  spending  as  much  more  in  putting  it  into  alfalfa,  have  a  ranch 
that  will  carry  three  thousand  cattle  and  keep  them  practically 
fat  all  the  year  round  with  very  little  risk  from  drought  or  severe 
winters.  (The  south  temperate  zone  has  almost  no  winter.) 
These  provinces  that  grow  alfalfa  so  easily  (Cordoba,  Santa  Fe, 
San  Luis,  and  western  Buenos  Ayres)  are  the  future  grazing 
lands  of  Argentina.  It  is  astonishing  what  large  areas  are 
taken  up  every  year  and  turned  into  alfalfa."  The  four  prov- 
inces mentioned  have  an  area  larger  than  Kansas,  Nebraska, 
Iowa,  and  Ohio  combined;  but  those  states  cannot  keep  an  ox 
on  two  and  one-third  acres  of  land,  for  they  are  not  such  natural 
alfalfa  land  as  are  the  silt  plains  to  the  west  of  the  Parana. 
The  open  winter  of  Argentina,  like  that  of  Texas,  makes  cattle 
raising  easy  because  it  is  unnecessary  to  build  barns. 

*  United   States   Department  of   Agriculture,   Report   No.   77.     Alfalfa 
Production  in  Argentine,  1904. 


JERKED  BEEF 


231 


Before  the  invention  of  refrigeration  the  cattle  industry  of  the 
Parana  (River  Plate)  countries  had  already  advanced  beyond 
the  shipments  of  hides,  tallow,  and  bones,  by  the  manufacture 
and  export  of  tasajo  jerked  beef  and  beef  extract.  Tasajo 
is  a  peculiarly  well  preserved, 
salted,  and  dried  beef  cured 
in  the  sunshine  of  the  great 
pasture  plains  (pampas).  It 
will  keep  indefinitely  in  such 
hot  humid  climates  as  Cuba 
and  Brazil ;  transportation  is 
therefore  easy.  For  many 
years  it  has  had  a  wide  dis- 
tribution over  tropic  Amer- 
ica. In  1910  Uruguay 
slaughtered  537,000  cattle  for 
tasajo,  in  1916  but  61,000. 
Plants  for  freezing  and  can- 
ning beef  had  come  to  Uru- 
guay and  the  tasajo  plants 
had  fled  to  the  interior  of 
Brazil. 

Beef  extract  is  a  conven- 
ient means  of  putting  a  big 
roast  into  a  small  bottle.  Its 
manufacture  is  therefore  an 
industry  that  can  afford  to 
go  to  the  farthest  corner  of  Fio.  79.— (Finch  and  Baker.) 

the  globe  for  cheap  beef.    Al- 
most every  drug  store  in  the  world  keeps  a  well-known  brand 
of  beef  extract  that  has  for  some  decades  been  manufactured 
on  the   banks  of  the  lower  Parana  from  the   cheap   beef  of 
Uruguay  and  Argentina. 

American  meat-packing  firms  from  Chicago  have  opened 
branches  in  Argentina  and  Uruguay  and  now  compete  with  the 
meat  extract  manufacturers  in  the  purchase  of  fat  cattle ;  they  sell 
the  meat  in  Europe  in  competition  with  the  product  of  North 
American  farms.  At  the  end  of  the  first  decade  of  this  century 
trial  shipments  of  beef  and  mutton  were  made  from  Argentina 


ARGENTINA.  URUGUAY 
AND  CHILE 

CATTLE 
NUMBER 

EACH  DOT  REPRESENTS  6.000 


232  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

to  the  United  States.  The  steady  decline  of  beef  animals  in 
this  country  brought  about  such  a  price  that  beef  was  imported 
to  the  extent  of  270  million  pounds,  mostly  from  Argentina,  be- 
fore the  war  entirely  upset  normal  trade  and  made  the  United 
States  once  more  an  exporting  nation.  It  is  probable  that  the 
restoration  of  peace  and  a  return  to  normal  prices  will  again 
bring  South  American  beef  to  New  York. 

CATTLE   IN   TROPIC   AMERICA   AND   TROPIC   AFRICA 

The  cattle  of  American  countries  north  of  Argentina  and 
south  of  the  United  States  have  only  slightly  affected  inter- 
national trade,  save  for  their  hides;  but  they  are  locally  im- 
portant. The  people  in  the  highlands  of  Mexico  and  Central 
America  and  the  Andean  countries  of  Colombia,  Ecuador,  Peru, 
and  Bolivia  have  cattle  everywhere,  but  never  a  surplus  to  ex- 
port, save  some  lean  cattle  that  move  across  the  Mexican 
boundary  into  the  United  States.  Cattle  in  large  numbers  are 
produced  in  small  herds  and  consumed  in  all  of  these  countries. 
Their  hides,  however,  constitute  a  general  and  important  export, 
since  they  keep  indefinitely  and  can  stand  nearly  all  conceivable 
abuses  in  transportation. 

During  the  period  of  the  war  the  cattle  of  the  tropics  have 
entered  the  world's  trade,  and  doubtless  have  entered  it  to  stay: 
for  the  tropics  have  important  cattle  resources.  Paraguay,  with 
cattle  as  its  chief  industry,  has  for  several  years  sent  30,000  to 
40,000  live  cattle  each  year  by  steamer  down  the  river  to  Argen- 
tina, and  has  had  hides  for  one  of  its  leading  exports.  This 
country  has  350  cattle  per  100  people — a  very  high  figure.  Be- 
cause of  the  meat  scarcity  during  the  Great  War,  one  of  the 
American  companies  erected  a  great  modern  plant  for  the 
manufacture  of  canned  beef  in  Paraguay,  2,000  miles  up  the 
Parana  River  from  Buenos  Ayres.  In  October,  1918,  it  was 
importing  tin  plate  from  the  United  States  and  sending  beef  to 
the  Allied  armies.  Brazil,  in  the  same  latitude  as  Paraguay, 
has  large  areas  of  almost  uninhabited  unforested  interior  be- 
tween 10°  and  30°  south  latitude.  In  1917  Chicago  men,  using 
American  equipment,  were  erecting  a  slaughter  house  a  few 
miles  from  Rio  Janeiro,  with  a  capacity  for  handling  700  head 


TROPIC  MEAT  PACKING  233 

of  cattle  a  day.  At  the  same  time  Armour  &  Company  of 
Chicago  were  supervising  the  construction  of  a  much  larger  plant 
four  miles  from  the  Brazilian  city  of  Sao  Paulo,  with  3,000 
employees,  and  a  daily  capacity  of  2,000  cattle,  3,000  hogs,  2,000 
sheep.  This  company  had  the  advantage  of  the  experience  of 
already  operating  a  plant  in  southern  Brazil  near  the  Uruguayan 
frontier. 

At  the  same  time  new  freezing  plants  were  going  up  at  Cor- 
rientes  (latitude  28°)  on  the  Parana,  in  Argentina,  and  British 
capitalists  were  building  a  meat-freezing  plant  at  Odzi  in  Rho- 
desia (latitude  20°),  inside  the  coast  ranges  at  the  edge  of  the 
great  veldt  over  which  the  Dutch  Boers,  after  the  fashion  of 
the  American  cowboy  on  the  similarly  dry  plains  of  New  Mexico, 
are  following  flocks  and  herds. 

CATTLE  IN  SOUTHEASTERN  ASIA 

In  number  of  cattle  India  leads  the  world,  her  supply 

nearly  equaling  the  combined  numbers  of  the  United  States  and 
the  Russian  Empire.  The  cattle  are  utilized  very  little  for  food,  as  the 
Hindus,  who  make  up  nearly  70  per  cent,  of  India's  population,  do  not 
eat  beef  under  any  conditions,  and  the  Mohammedans,  who  form  over 
20  per  cent.,  forego  it  largely  out  of  sympathy,  except  on  feast  days. 
The  cattle  are  of  the  humped  type,  though  many  breeds  exist.  The 
bullocks  are  used  universally  for  labor.  In  most  parts  of  India  cattle 
are  objects  of  religious  esteem  and  the  cows  and  bullocks  beyond  their 
years  of  usefulness  are  not  killed,  but  subsist  in  a  meager  way  until 
they  die  natural  deaths.  The  carcasses  are  then  skinned  by  a  special 
caste  and  become  carrion,  or  are  sometimes  buried.  The  utilization  of 
cattle  instead  of  the  buffalo  for  labor  in  the  delta  region  of  Bengal  is 
due  in  part  to  prejudice  against  the  latter  and  especially  against  its 
milk.  The  cattle  of  this  region  are  small  and  of  poor  quality  and  might 
well  be  supplanted  by  the  buffaloes,  which  are  suited  to  this  region,  as 
is  shown  by  their  number  in  the  delta  of  the  Kistna,  north  of  Madras.* 

In  the  Philippines,  a  somewhat  similar  dependence  upon  cattle 
was  disturbed  by  rinderpest  (cattle  plague),  which  resulted  in 
the  loss  of  cattle  "to  such  an  extent  that  the  entire  economic 
situation  of  the  islands  was  endangered"  (United  States  Con- 

*  Finch,  V.  C.,  and  Baker,  O.  E.:  Geography  of  the  World's  Agriculture, 
p.  118. 


234  THE   DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

sular  Report,  January  23,  1911).  The  same  diseases  ravaged 
Siam,  while  in  1912  and  1913  southern  China  carried  on  a 
lively  trade  in  restocking  the  Philippines  with  live  cattle.  For 
several  years  there  have  been  small  imports  of  Australian  fresh 
beef  into  both  the  Philippines  and  Siam. 
• 

THE    FUTURE    SUPPLY    AND    PRICE    OF    MEAT 

The  nineteenth  century  was  a  period  of  industrial  discovery 
and  commercial  expansion  by  means  of  railways,  steamboats, 
refrigerator  cars  and  ships.  This  condition  permitted  the  West- 
ern World  to  have  for  a  few  decades  the  cheapest  meat  supply 
it  is  ever  likely  to  have.  There  are  no  more  great  plains  to  dis- 
cover, and  the  population  is  increasing  much  faster  than  the 
number  of  meat  animals;  as  a  result  meat  is  today  rising  in 
price,  in  practically  all  parts  of  the  world.  For  this  situation 
there  is  no  remedy  in  sight,  and  it  may  not  be  an  entirely  fanci- 
ful prediction  that  fifty  years  hence  a  juicy  beefsteak  will  be 
the  center-piece  at  the  banquet  table. 

Paris  complained  that  between  1902  and  1910  the  wholesale 
price  of  meat  increased  forty-five  per  cent,  at  her  abattoirs. 
Similar  conditions  in  Germany  had,  before  the  war,  caused  an 
absolute  decline  in  the  number  of  animals  slaughtered,  and  that 
empire  was  importing  $120,000,000  worth  of  forage  per  year. 
This  situation  must  continue  after  the  war.  Supplies  brought 
from  new  producing  regions  may  be  expected  to  afford  some 
relief,  but  all  the  great  areas  on  the  agricultural  frontier  are 
already  producing.  The  recently  established  exportation  of 
pork  from  Hankow,  six  hundred  miles  inland  in  China,  to 
Liverpool  is  interesting,  but  it  shows  no  important  new  source 
of  supply.  It  is  chiefly  promoted  by  the  very  low  prices  now 
prevailing  in  China  and  the  fact  that  most  of  her  people  are  too 
poor  to  eat  meat. 

Examination  of  world  resources  shows  us  that  the  chances  for 
increase  of  beef  cannot  be  compared  with  our  chances  for  in- 
crease of  potatoes,  rice,  or  wheat.  The  prospects  in  Europe  are 
well  shown  by  the  pre-war  conditions  in  Germany:  namely,  de- 
cline because  the  land  is  needed  for  milch  cows,  and  fields  of 
wheat,  barley,  rye,  potatoes,  and  sugar  beets.  While  Europe 


AFRICAN  PROSPECTS  235 

may  produce  a  little  more  beef  than  she  now  raises,  her  desire 
for  it  will  grow  more  rapidly  than  her  production.  Asia  will 
afford  little  relief,  for  she  has  long  since  passed  the  meat-pro- 
ducing stage,  and  save  for  some  production  in  Siberia,  is  more 
likely  to  join  Europe  in  the  desire  to  import  meat.  Australasia 
may  increase  her  output,  two  or  three  fold  perhaps,  but  the  great 
handicap  of  drought  prevents  her  from  ever  having  numbers  of 
cattle  nearly  approaching  those  of  Germany  or  the  United  States. 

In  Africa  the  chances  are  better.  There  are  large  areas  in  the 
highlands  of  east  Africa,  perhaps  in  the  Soudan,  where  the 
example  of  the  Rhodesian  meat  plant  previously  mentioned  may 
be  followed,  and  perhaps  energetic  men  might  make  large 
alfalfa  areas.  At  the  present  time,  however,  the  African  cattle 
are  relatively  unimportant :  the  number  reported  from  the  whole 
continent  is  about  the  same  as  that  from  Uruguay  and  Paraguay 
combined  (about  twelve  million  in  1910)  and  the  most  important 
part  of  the  continent,  British  South  Africa,  has  about  as  many 
(four  million)  as  Iowa.  African  climate  upon  the  whole  is  ill 
adapted  to  cattle.  Aridity  makes  both  north  and  south  Africa 
resemble  the  less  favorable  parts  of  our  arid  West.  It  is  too 
wet  and  hot  in  much  of  central  Africa  for  cattle  to  live  at  all, 
and  the  interior  plateaus  have  not  yet  been  settled,  though  they 
seem  to  be  lands  of  promise,  cattle  promise  at  least.  South 
Africa  was  reduced  to  the  brink  of  financial  ruin  a  few 
years  ago  because  the  rinderpest  swept  from  the  Zambezi 
River  almost  to  Cape  Town,  killing  nearly  all  the  cattle  as 
it  went.  The  stopping  of  this  onrushing  wave  of  death  is  an 
interesting  example  of  large-scale  government  work,  one  of  the 
hopes  of  the  future.  The  disease  went  by  contact  from  district 
to  district,  across  river,  vale,  and  plain,  until  in  the  highlands 
of  Cape  Colony  the  British  prepared  for  it  by  removing  all  cattle 
from  a  wide  zone.  The  cattle  died  down  to  the  edge  of  this 
empty  zone,  where  there  was  no  means  of  transmitting  the  dis- 
ease, which  therefore  stopped. 

The  Boer  who  was  dependent  on  his  ox  cart  was  deprived  by 
this  plague  of  the  means  of  transportation,  and  the  farmer  who 
had  been  keeping  cattle  had  to  turn  to  some  other  resource. 
Science  has  now  conquered  the  disease  and  the  industry  is  being 
restored.  In  Matabeleland,  Rhodesia,  north  of  the  Transvaal 


236  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

border,  a  large  grant  of  land  was  recently  made  to  a  London 
company,  which  built  dipping  tanks  (for  disinfecting  live  ani- 
mals and  removing  disease-carrying  vermin),  dug  wells,  and 
stocked  its  ranch  with  cattle.  It  planned  to  build  a  meat-extract 
plant.  The  location,  as  far  from  the  Southern  Sea  as  is  Chicago 
from  the  Atlantic,  and  with  no  home  market  and  no  lake  boats, 
suggests  the  manufacture  of  a  concentrated  product.  The  build- 
ing of  the  freezing  plant  previously  mentioned  nearer  the  sea 
indicates  the  success  of  the  restoration  of  the  cattle  industry  in 
these  plague-swept  lands. 

Tropic  America  has  important  unused  resources  for  cattle  pro- 
duction. The  new  packing  plants  building  last  year  in  Para- 
guay and  Brazil  are  suggestive  of  increased  output  from  the 
large  unused  semi-arid  interior  region  of  Brazil  and  Paraguay, 
as  large  as  that  of  the  United  States  lying  west  of  the  one 
hundredth  meridian,  which,  because  of  its  aridity,  is  also  largely 
limited  to  meat  production.  The  grassy  plains  of  the  Orinoco 
with  their  alternating  periods  of  rainfall  and  unbroken  sun- 
shine have  large  unused  possibilities.  Other  lands,  such  as 
Colombia  and  Central  America,  produce  grass  the  year  round 
and  arc  well  suited  to  cattle.  Diseases  that  have  been  fatal  in 
the  past  need  not  be  so  in  a  more  scientific  future.  Trans- 
portation difficulties  hinder  the  project  It  costs  more  to  get  a 
bullock  from  Guatemala  City  to  Puerto  Barrios,  one  hundred 
and  ninety-six  miles,  than  it  does  to  take  him  from  western 
Kansas  to  Chicago.  If  he  continues  his  journey  to  New  Orleans, 
the  total  cost,  is  double  the  freight  from  western  Kansas  to  New 
York  or  Boston.  But  if  the  cattle  existed  in  great  numbers, 
they  could  doubtless  be  moved  more  cheaply.  The  recent  ship- 
ment of  dressed  beef  to  England  from  Puerto  Cabello,  Vene- 
zuela, suggests  on  a  much  smaller  scale  the  revolution  already 
wrought  in  Argentina  and  Uruguay. 

The  best  prospects  for  the  prompt  increase  of  the  world's  beef 
supply  may  be  expected  to  result  from  the  extension  of  alfalfa 
growing  in  Argentina  and  the  more  careful  utilization  of  the 
great  meat-producing  possibilities  of  the  cotton-belt  of  the  United 
States.  This  latter  region  has  been  surprisingly  neglected,  but 
the  chief  factor  in  its  neglect — namely,  the  cattle  tick — is  now 
in  full  retreat  before  the  disinfecting  army  led  by  the  veteri- 


AN  INSECT  AND  THE  MEAT  SUPPLY 


237 


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238  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  CATTLE 

narians  of  the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture.  For 
years  cattle  from  the  Southern  States  brought  mysterious  death 
as  they  traveled  northward.  The  disease  was  called  Texas  fever. 
It  would  kill  whole  herds  that  had  come  in  contact  with  cattle 
from  the  South.  That  was  about  all  we  knew — mysterious  death. 
We  conquered  it  by  establishing  a  quarantine  line  across  which 
cattle  could  come  only  in  the  winter  time,  when,  for  some  un- 
known reason,  the  cattle  from  the  South  did  not  spread  infection. 
We  now  know  the  life  cycle  and  the  career  of  this  disease.  It  is 
much  like  that  of  malaria;  though  far  less  mobile.  The  carrying 
agent  is  a  crawling  tick  that  sucks  blood  from  the  semi-immune 
southern  cattle,  gets  the  deadly  disease  germ,  then  bites  the 
unimmune  northern  thoroughbred  and  gives  the  disease  to  him 
with  fatal  results.  By  plunging  the  cattle,  ears,  horns,  and  all, 
into  disinfecting  liquid  in  specially  prepared  vats,  the  ticks  arc 
killed  and  the  cattle  cleaned.  By  millions  of  these  uncomfort- 
able but  beneficial  dippings,  the  quarantine  line  has  been  steadily 
advanced  to  the  southward  until  in  1917  the  state  of  Mississippi 
held  a  great  jollification  over  having  driven  a  great  wedge  into 
the  quarantine  line  by  becoming  entirely  clear. 

Between  July  1,  1906,  and  December  1,  1917,  the  area  of  tick- 
infested  land  in  the  United  States  decreased  fifty-two  per  cent., 
from  728,000  square  miles  to  349,000  square  miles.  It  should 
be  made  one  hundred  per  cent,  free  by  absolute  compulsion  in 
twelve  months'  time.  The  people  of  the  Southern  States  could 
then  utilize  their  great  cattle  advantages.  The  Minnesota 
farmer  must  build  large  barns  to  protect  his  animals  and  their 
food  from  the  cold  and  storms  of  winter.  He  must  feed  his 
animals  throughout  half  the  year  from  the  results  of  his  sum- 
mer's toil.  In  Alabama,  South  Carolina,  or  Louisiana,  there  is  so 
little  winter  that  a  barn  is  scarcely  necessary,  and  the  growing 
season  is  so  much  longer  that  more  forage  can  be  produced  on 
a  given  piece  of  land  than  on  similar  land  in  the  Northern 
States.  The  cattle  can  also  pasture  nearly  all  the  year;  there- 
fore the  industry  requires  less  capital  and  labor  than  in  the 
North.*  The  great  advantages  of  the  South  for  stock  raising 

*  Pasture  grasses  of  the  South  are  not  so  succulent  as  those  of  the 
Xorth,  but  in  the  warm  Southland  with  its  good  rainfall,  tractor  plowed 
lands  sown  to  peas,  beans,  vetches,  clover,  cane,  and  small  grains  produce 
great  food  supply  for  pasturing  beasts. 


THE  POSSIBLE  INCREASE  OF  BEEF  239 

have  not  up  to  the  present  time  been  used,  because  of  the  great 
and  almost  exclusive  dependence  of  the  farmers  on  cotton,  a 
money  crop  of  unusual  excellence,  and  because  of  the  deadly 
tick.  The  conquest  of  the  tick  is  very  suggestive  in  connection 
with  the  utilization  of  the  tropics.  Equally  suggestive  are  the 
experiments  with  the  tropically  acclimated  Indian  breeds  of 
humped  cattle. 

The  number  of  meat  animals  in  North  and  South  America, 
Africa,  and  Australia,  can  be  increased  several  fold  if  we  will 
follow  the  practice  of  those  parts  of  western  Europe  where  the 
animals  are  kept  in  barns  and  supplied  with  food  cultivated  with 
great  care  and  intensity  of  labor.  Such  a  prospect  is,  however, 
decades  or  generations  in  the  future,  and  it  involves  a  price  of 
meat  several  times  as  high  as  that  to  which  the  Western  World 
was  accustomed  before  the  Great  War. 

No  discussion  of  unused  meat  resources  should  cause  us  for  a 
moment  to  forget  the  fact  that  there  is  no  prospect  of  permanent 
relief  in  sight.  After  the  war  prices  will  fall  somewhat  from 
their  high  level,  but  there  is  little  prospect  of  meat  being  as 
cheap  relatively  as  it  was  before  the  war.  There  will  be  in- 
creases of  supply,  but  also  increases  of  demand.  Indeed,  we 
may  scarcely  expect  it  to  hold  its  own,  but  instead  to  become 
relatively  scarcer,  and,  as  the  population  of  the  world  doubles 
and  triples,  that  small  minority  in  the  Western  World  who  have 
so  nearly  monopolized  the  world's  meat  will  have  to  reduce  their 
consumption.  It  is  fortunate  that  science  as  well  as  the  Oriental 
practice  shows  that  meat  is  not  after  all  so  important  a  food  as 
we  had  thought.  More  and  more  of  the  human  race  will  do  well 
to  approach  the  philosophy  of  the  old  colored  man  who  had  just 
taken  a  rabbit  out  of  his  trap  and  was  gloating  over  the  prospect 
of  fried  rabbit  and  corn  pone,  when,  with  a  bound,  away  scam- 
pered the  rabbit.  "Oh,  well,"  said  the  old  man,  "it's  dry  old 
eatin'  anyhow." 


CHAPTER  XI 
DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

MILK  is  the  greatest  of  foods.  It  is  the  only  indispensable  article 
on  the  human  bill  of  fare.  It  is  also  the  only  one  that  is  made 
especially  to  support  animal  life.  We  can  dispense  with  meat  or 
bread,  but  we  cannot  dispense  with  milk;  indeed  we  should  use 
more  of  it  than  we  do.  One  of  the  facts  upon  which  nearly  all 
the  authorities  in  the  nearly  new  science  of  human  nutrition  are 
agreed  is  that  milk  in  some  form  should,  with  few  and  rare 
exceptions,  be  part  of  the  food  of  every  one.*  Lusk  and  others 
agree  in  the  recommendation  that  no  family  of  five  should  ever 
buy  meat  until  they  have  bought  three  quarts  of  milk  daily. 

Whole  milk  contains  everything  necessary  for  the  growth  and 
maintenance  of  the  human  body :  protein,  fat,  milk  sugar,  salts, 
water,  and  more — certain  unknown  substances,  sometimes  called 
vitamines,  vitalizers  we  might  call  them.  On  account  of  their 
unknown  nature  some  writers  prefer  to  refer  to  them  without 
name  as  "water  soluble  A"  and  "fat  soluble  B,"  because  they 
find  two  classes  of  these  mysterious  substances  without  which 

*  Milk  is  the  greatest  source  of  calcium  (lime).  Lime  is  one  of  the 
components  of  food  that  serves  two  purposes:  it  is  both  building  material 
for  bones  and  regulating  material  for  the  body  as  a  whole,  helping  in 
several  important  ways  to  maintain  good  health.  It  is  essential  that 
every  one  have  a  supply  of  lime  and  particularly  important  that  all 
growing  infants,  children,  and  young  people  have  plenty  for  construction 
of  bones  and  teeth.  There  is  almost  none  in  meat  and  bread,  none  in 
common  fats  and  sugars,  and  comparatively  few  common  foods  can  be 
taken  alone  and  digested  in  large  enough  quantities  to  insure  an  adequate 
supply;  whereas  a  pint  of  milk  (whole,  skim,  or  buttermilk)  will  guar- 
antee to  a  grown  person  a  sufficient  amount,  and  a  quart  a  day  will 
provide  for  the  greater  needs  of  growing  children.  Whatever  other  foods 
we  have,  we  cannot  afford  to  leave  milk  out  of  the  diet  because  of  its  lime. 
Under  the  most  favorable  dietary  conditions,  when  the  diet  is  liberal  and 
varied,  an  adult  should  have  at  least  half  a  pint  of  milk  a  day  and  no 
child  should  be  expected  to  thrive  with  less  than  a  pint." — Rose,  Dr.  Mary 
Swartz:  Everyday  Foods  in  War  Time,  pp.  5-6. 

The  United  States  Food  Administration  urges  the  nation  as  follows: 
"  If  you  cut  down  your  war-time  order,  don't  cut  down  the  children's 
milk;  cut  somewhere  else." 

240 


THE  GREATEST  OF  FOODS 


241 


SCIENTIFICALLY 
CALLED 


ORDINARILY 
CALLED 


TOTAL  < 
SOLIDS 


WATER 


FIG.  81. — The  contents  of  a  bottle  of  milk.    (Boston  Chamber  of  Commerce.) 

men  and  other  animals  die.  "We  may  liken  them  to  electricity, 
a  force  which  man  may  use,  but  whose  nature  remains  absolutely 
unknown;  we  know  how  to  produce  it  and  use  it,  but  do  not 
know  what  it  is.  The  same  thing  is  true  of  the  vitamines. 

The  students  of  nutrition  have  really  greatly  misled  them- 
selves and  others  by  talking  of  foods  only  in  terms  of  calories — 
protein,  carbohydrate,  starch,  fat,  etc.,  omitting  vitamines.  Cer- 


242  DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

tain  food  experiments  are  good  examples  of  the  old  errors  and 
troubles  of  the  food  expert.  Animals  have  been  given  experi- 
mental diet  with  plenty  of  protein,  plenty  of  carbohydrates, 
plenty  of  calories  furnished  by  a  good  variety  of  grains,  seeds, 
and  vegetable  fats.  In  from  five  to  seven  weeks  the  animals' 
eyes  became  inflamed,  they  lost  weight,  went  blind,  and  died. 
But  if,  before  the  trouble  had  gone  too  far,  the  wretched  beasts 
were  given  a  tiny  piece  of  butter,  all  was  well  with  them.  Their 
eyes  recovered,  their  weight  increased,  and  they  grew  sleek  and 
fat.  What  had  happened?  Calories — carbohydrate,  protein, 
starch,  fat — do  not  tell  the  tale.  Most  of  the  cells  in  grains  are 
dead ;  the  living  cells  of  the  stalks  and  leaves  of  plants  are  a 
necessary  element  of  nutrition,  along  with  the  seeds.  The  vital- 
izers  or  vitamines  come  to  most  animals  through  the  eating  of 
leaves.  The*  sore-eyed  experimental  rat  recovers  as  quickly  when 
he  is  fed  alfalfa  leaves  as  when  he  is  given  milk  product.  On  a 
combination  of  rolled  oats  sixty  per  cent,  and  ground  alfalfa 
forty  per  cent,  a  young  rat  thrives,  though  he  was  starving  to 
death  on  a  collection  of  the  best  grains  in  the  granary.  Follow- 
ing this  clue  experiments  are  being  made  by  the  United  States 
Department  of  Agriculture  in  co-operation  with  Dr.  E.  V. 
McCollum,  of  Johns  Hopkins  University,  to  produce  bread  made 
of  a  mixture  of  ground  alfalfa  and  ground  grain.  The  chief 
difficulty  appears  to  be  the  unpalatable  flavor  of  the  alfalfa ;  we 
may,  however,  reasonably  expect  to  produce  a  pleasant-flavored 
alfalfa.  Dr.  McCollum  says : 

If  it  shall  some  day  be  found  feasible  to  incorporate  with  wheat  in 
the  making  of  bread  a  sufficient  amount  of  a  leaf  to  insure  safety,  a 
strictly  vegetarian  diet  may  be  found  whicll  would  meet  all  the  require- 
ments of  man.  At  present  there  is  probably  no  diet  employed  by  man 
which  is  strictly  vegetarian  in  character,  which  induces  perfectly  normal 
well-being.  I  say  this  with  the  knowledge  that  there  are  in  India, 
Japan,  China,  and  other  parts  of  the  far  East,  people  who  are  prac- 
tically strict  vegetarians  in  their  dietary  habits.  In  no  case,  however, 
are  these  peoples  so  vigorous  and  progressive  as  they  should  be.* 
These  vegetarians,  however,  eat  several  times  as  much  of  the  leafy 
vegetables  as  do  the  people  of  the  United  States.  This  fact,  I  feel 
confident,  explains  their  continued  existence.! 

*  Before  accepting  this  as  a  purely  dietary  result,  see  Huntington, 
Climate  and  Civilization,  mentioned  in  a  later  chapter. 

t  McCollum,  Dr.  E.  V.:  Hoard's  Dairyman,  December  21,  1917,  p.  770 


THE  MILK  THEORY  OF  ENERGY  243 

Dr.  McCollum  is  confident  that  the  people  of  Russia,  India, 
and  other  parts  of  the  Orient  not  only  suffer  from  beri-beri  be- 
cause of  lack  of  greens  and  milk,  but  also  have  eye  troubles 
almost  exactly  like  those  of  the  rats  mentioned  above: 

Since  it  is  not  feasible  at  the  present  time  to  attempt  to  plan  a  diet 
for  man  which  will  contain  both  the  seed  and  leal  of  the  plant  in  such 
proportion  as  will  make  the  diet  complete,  there  is  but  a  single  method 
of  procedure  by  means  of  which  we  can  be  certain  that  the  nutrition 
of  our  people  will  be  safeguarded.  That  is  to  maintain  the  dairy  in- 
dustry at  its  present  extent  of  development.  Actually  it  should  be 
considerably  increased,  but  it  must  not  be  permitted  to  decline.  If  it 
does,  the  United  States  will  not  long  maintain  its  position  of  supremacy 
in  the  fields  of  human  endeavor  requiring  both  physical  and  intellectual 
vigor.  Such  vigor  can  be  maintained  only  when  the  diet  is  highly 
satisfactory  in  its  chemical  makeup,  and  neither  the  sense  of  taste  nor 
the  utmost  refinement  of  the  chemist's  technique  can  discover  when  the 
food  is  satisfactory.  This  can  be  learned  only  by  means  of  properly 
planned  feeding  experiments.*  I  have  so  perfected  this  type  of  feeding 
work  as  to  make  of  it  a  systematic  biological  analysis  of  foodstuffs,  and 
we  are  now  rapidly  acquiring  the  precise  knowledge  of  the  peculiar 
properties  of  our  natural  foodstuffs  which  will  eventually  enable  us  to 
so  combine  them  as  to  obtain  the  very  best  possible  results  both  in 
human  nutrition  and  animal  production.! 

In  connection  with  the  oft-repeated  statement  that  the  people 
of  England  and  America  have  been  so  efficient  and  energetic 
because  of  the  meat  they  eat,  Dr.  McCollum  says: 

I  have  come  to  the  conclusion,  after  carefully  analyzing  the  probable 
effectiveness  of  the  combinations  of  foods  employed  in  human  nutrition, 
that  the  efficiency  of  a  people  can  be  predicted  with  a  fair  degree  of 
accuracy  from  a  knowledge  of  the  degree  to  which  they  consume  dairy 
products.  Probably  the  use  of  meat  and  of  milk  and  its  products  will 
in  nearly  all  cases  run  more  or  less  nearly  parallel,  and  I  venture  to 
assert  that  it  is  the  milk  and  butter  and  cheese,  and  not  the  meat  which 

*  As  proof  of  this,  Dr.  McCollum  records  the  placing  of  families  of  rats 
in  the  presence  of  abundance  of  wheat,  corn,  barley,  other  grains,  and 
various  foods  prepared  for  them,  and  also  alfalfa  meal.  According  to 
a  widely  held  notion  about  the  guidance  of  the  instinct  of  taste,  the 
animals  should  pick  out  of  this  what  they  need  and  thrive.  Instead  they 
have  repeatedly  starved  to  death,  although  by  the  taking  of  two  of  the 
articles,  namely,  alfalfa  meal  and  oats,  and  confining  rats  exclusively  to 
a  mixture  of  these,  they  throve,  grew,  and  raised  increasing  generations  of 
their  pestiferous  offspring. 

t  McCollum,  Dr.  E.  V.:  Hoard's  Dairyman,  December  21,  1917,  p    771. 


244 


DAIRY  PRODUCTS 


has  the  good  influence  on  the  promotion  of  the  virile  qualities  of  the 
people.* 

I  only  wish  to  point  out  the  fact,  which  rests  upon  sound  experi- 
mental evidence,  that  milk  is  an  indispensable  article  of  the  diet  of  any 
people  who  wish  to  achieve;  that  milk  production  cannot  rest  upon  a 


1830  to  1884  §g  1885  to  18S9  §§  1890  to  1894  gg  1895  to  1889  §  1900  to  1904  g  1905  to  1909 


FIG.  82. — Our  increasing  knowledge  of  the  cause  of  infant  diseases  and 
the  importance  of  milk  as  food  is  causing  rapid  increase  of  govern- 
mental authority  over  the  milk  business.  In  a  short  time  we  will  prob- 
ably have  one  sanitary  wagon  exercising  a  controlled  milk  monopoly  at 
a  greatly  reduced  cost  of  service,  instead  of  having  ten  unsanitary 
wagons  rattling  over  each  residence  street  each  day.  This  districting 
has  already  been  done  in  London  under  pressure  of  war  shortage,  and 
the  same  thing  is  already  rapidly  working  itself  out  in  several  American 
cities,  especially  Philadelphia.  Clean  milk  can  be  made  much  more 
cheaply  than  is  supposed.  If  done  in  a  large  and  sanitary  way,  certified 
milk  can  be  produced  for  only  two  cents  a  quart  more  than  any  other 
(pre-war  figures).  This  was  proved  by  the  experience  of  Germany  and 
by  figures  from,  the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture. 

philanthropic  basis,  but  must  be  a  paying  industry.  I  want  to  empha- 
size that  the  public  must  allow  the  price  of  milk  to  advance  so  that  the 
industry  is  profitable  to  the  dairyman.  Milk  is  worth  much  more  than 
its  energy  value  or  than  its  protein  content  would  indicate.  It  is  the 
great  factor  of  safety  in  making  good  the  deficiencies  of  the  grains 

*  This  interesting  statement  is  probably  too  strong  See  Huntington 
(op.  cit. )  on  climate  influence  and  note  the  description  of  the  almost 
milkless  Chinese  and  Japanese  diet  in  chapter  on  Vegetables. 


MILK  AS  A  GROWTH  AND  FOOD  FACTOR         245 

which  form  and  must  continue  to  form  the  principal  source  of  energy 
in  our  diet.  Without  the  continued  use  of  milk,  not  only  for  the  feeding 
of  our  children,  but  in  liberal  amounts  in  cooking  and  as  an  adjuvant 
to  our  diet,  we  cannot  as  a  nation  maintain  the  position  as  a  world 
power  to  which  we  have  arisen.  The  keeping  of  dairy  animals  was  the 
greatest  factor  in  the  history  of  the  development  of  man  from  a  state 
of  barbarism.  We  are  now  in  a  critical  time  when  the  dairy  industry 
is  in  jeopardy.  I  feel  it  my  privilege  to  point  out  that  we  are  still 
dependent  upon  the  dairy  industry  for  our  continued  prosperity.  Let 
us  appreciate  the  debt  we  owe  to  the  milk  producer,  and  reward  him 
according  to  the  service  he  renders. 

Thus  far  milk  has  been  chiefly  praised  for  its  mysterious 
vitalizing  effect,  which  makes  other  foods  available,  but  it  is  also 
a  very  valuable  food  in  itself,  in  its  content  of  protein,  carbo- 
hydrate, fat,  and  mineral  salts.  The  fact  that  it  was  meant  to 
build  the  bodies  of  the  young  gives  it  peculiar  ability  to  supple- 
ment the  shortcomings  of  other  foods,  and  explains  its  impor- 
tance in  the  diet  of  every  one.  It  is  fortunate  that  ten  or  twenty 
times  the  present  supply  of  a  food  so  vital  and  so  valuable  can 
be  produced. 

The  milk  animals  render  us  a  great  service  in  making  food  for 
us  out  of  things  that  we  ourselves  cannot  eat.*  Bacteria  at  the 

*  The   prodigious   achievement   of   one   record-breaking   Holstein   cow   in 
converting  vegetation  into  milk  shows  Ihe  following  facts: 
"Tilly's,"  record  by  years  is  as  follows: 

Age  at  Calving  Butter  Milk 

2  years  6  months  556  20  14,837.2 

3  years  5  months 84 1  22  21 ,421  3 

5  years  1   month     1 ,1 89.03  30,451 .4 

6  years  5  months 1,190  46  29,826  6 

7  years  7  months  1,042.20  26,814.8 

9  years  2  months  1 ,323.00  33,424.8 

Total   for  6  years    6,142.11  156,776.1 

The  feed  consumed  during  the  test  year  totals  as  follows: 

Pasture — 4  hours  daily  for  nine  months. 

Pounds  Pounds 

Ground   barley    1,325            Beets     21 ,000 

Ground  oats    1 ,325            Dri«-d  beet  pulp    2,550 

Bran    1,325            Silage    3,000 

Soy-bean  meal 1,165           Alfalfa  hay  5,000 

Cotton-seed  meal    ....        532 

Linseed  meal 200                    Total     31,550 


Total 5,872 

Tilly  started  with  ten  pounds  of  concentrates  daily,  and  this  was  in- 
creased to  twenty  pounds  three  or  four  weeks  after  calving.   .    .    .   Lhiring 


246  DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

roots  of  clover  catch  nitrogen.  The  clover  gets  it  from  the  bac- 
teria. The  farmer  makes  the  clover  into  hay.  Months  later  the 
cow  converts  the  hay  into  milk  to  make  the  baby  grow.  Dr. 
George  F.  Warren,  averaging  the  figures  for  8,000  cows  averag- 
ing 6,198  pounds  each  of  milk  per  year,  finds  that  100  pounds 
of  milk  required  for  their  production  33  pounds  of  grain,  61 
pounds  of  hay,  97  pounds  of  corn  silage,  and  2.8  hours  of  human 
labor. 

Milk  enters  largely  into  commerce  in  the  form  of  its  deriva- 
tives, butter,  buttermilk,  cheese,  condensed,  evaporated,*  and  de- 
hydrated milk.  In  these  concentrated  forms  it  can  be  kept  for 
months.  Butter  retains  the  fat,  and  cheese  retains  both  the  fat 
and  tissue-creating  elements.  During  the  food  shortage  of  the 
war  the  United  States  Food  Administration  very  wisely  laid 
emphasis  upon  the  fact  that  large  quantities  of  skim  milk  were 
being  fed  to  pigs  or  even  in  some  cases  being  thrown  away  in 
the  United  States,  when  really  it  is  a  very  valuable  foodstuff  in 
the  form  of  soft  or  cottage  cheese,f  which  has  a  protein  supply 

her  heaviest  production  she  consumed  eighty  pounds  of  beets  daily  and 
eight  to  fourteen  pounds  of  dried  beet  pulp,  with  ten  to  twenty  pounds 
of  alfalfa  hay.  .  .  .  Tilly  averaged  above  twenty  pounds  of  butterfat — 
more  than  twenty-five  pounds  of  butter — a  week  for  the  year.  Her  milk 
sold  wholesale  for  $020  at  $2.75  a  hundred  pounds,  which  is  below  the 
average  in  the  United  States  .  .  .  Charging  her  feed  at  prevailing 
prices  I  find  that  for  each  dollar  in  feed  consumed  Tilly  has  returned 
$3  17  in  milk,  or,  if  sold  for  churning  purposes,  she  would  have  returned 
$2.90  for  cacli  dollar  in  feed." — Robert  E.  Jones  in  The  Country  Gentle- 
man, February  8,  1919. 

This  cow  seems  to  have  been  a  veritable  factory. 

*  Condensed  milk  is  made  by  boiling  off  part  of  the  water  of  milk  and 

then    canning    the    remainder,    either    with    or    without    sugar.      By    more 

recent  processes  all  the  water  is  driven  off  and  the  milk  is  left  as  a  powder. 

t  For   supplying  protein,   the   Food   Administration   says   one   pound   of 

cottage  cheese  equals — 

1.27  pounds  sirloin  steak  1.46  pounds  fresh  ham 

1  09  pounds  round  steak  1  44  pounds  smoked  ham 

1  37  pounds  chuck  rib  beef  1  58  pounds  loin  pork  chops 

1.52  pounds  fowl  1.31   pounds  hind  leg  of  lamb 

1.37  pounds  breast  of  veal. 

In  addition  to  protein,  energy  for  performing  body  work  must  be  fur- 
nished by  food.     As  a  source  of  energy  also,  cottage  cheese  is  cheaper  than 
most  meats  at  present  prices.     The  following  table  shows  the  comparison 
when  energy  is  considered. 
On  the  basis  of  energy  supplied,  one  pound  of  cottage  cheese  equals — 

8%  ounces  sirloin  steak  10%  ounces  fowl 

111,4  ounces  round  steak  5^  ounces  fresh  ham 

1114  ounces  chuck  rib  beef  5       ounces  smoked  ham 

0  ounces  loin  pork  chop. 


MILK  AS  GERM  CARRIER  247 

of  tissue-making  materials  as  good  as  those  of  lean  beef,  at  a 
much  lower  price.  Buttermilk  also  has  the  same  quality. 

Although  a  perfect  food,  in  that  it  completely  sustains  life, 
milk  is  very  dangerous  because  of  the  ease  of  contamination  in 
its  collection,  and  the  further  fact  that  it  is  a  perfect  germ  cul- 
ture. The  relationship  between  the  condition  of  the  milk  supply 
and  the  infant  death  rate  is  often  astonishing.  Our  increasing 
knowledge  of  the  causes  of  disease  and  health  has  promoted  rapid 
increase  in  the  extent  of  governmental  control  and  supervision 
of  the  milk  supply. 

Cheese,  a  condensed  form  of  milk,  is  a  substitute  for  meat  (see 
table  of  food  analyses)  ;  and  butter  is  a  fat,  supplying  well  that 
deficiency  in  the  albuminous  and  starchy  foods.  For  this  reason 
it  is  eaten  with  bread.  All  three  of  these  major  dairy  products, 
especially  milk  and  butter,  are  valuable  in  the  preparation  of 
many  other  articles  of  food.  A  good  rice  pudding,  for  example, 
is  a  very  easy  way  for  an  adult  to  get  a  fine  supply  of  lime  and 
other  salts  along  with  some  easily  digestible  proteins. 

THE   DAIRY    INDUSTRY 

The  dairy  industry  is  widely  scattered  because  of  many  forces, 
agricultural,  climatic,  commercial,  personal,  and  social.  Among 
these  is  the  fact  that  its  products  are  for  immediate  or  nearby 
use,  as  well  as  distant  and  later  use. 

Milk,  intended  only  for  the  offspring  of  the  particular  species 
producing  it,  has  been  taken  by  man  at  various  times  and  places 
from  camels,  mares,  sheep,  goats,  cows,  and  even  the  Indian  water 
buffalo.  As  a  result  of  long  selection  and  improvement,  the  goat 
and  the  cow  have  become  especially  adapted  to  this  service  and 
give  quantities  of  milk  which  would  have  astonished  our  pri- 
meval ancestors  who  first  domesticated  the  animals.  Breeds  of 
cattle  are  of  two  classes — the  beef  animals  that  get  fat  if  well 
fed,  and  the  dairy  or  milk  breeds  that  give  much  milk  if  well  fed. 

To  what  extent  the  qualities  of  these  different  breeds  of  dairy  cattle 
as  regards  bodily  form,  temperament,  yield,  and  quality  of  milk  are  due 
to  the  natural  conditions  in  the  regions  of  their  origin  is  not  well  known. 
Doubtless  the  breeders'  ideals  have  been  very  important  factors  in  their 
formations.  The  force  of  environment,  however,  may  be  seen  in  certain 


248  DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

well-recognized  characteristics.  Such  are  the  heavy,  well-muscled  bodies 
of  the  Brown  Swiss,  required  in  climbing  mountain  pastures,  and  the 
thriftiness  and  ability  to  thrive  on  scant  pastures  of  the  Ayrshire 
breed,  which  originated  on  the  uplands  of  Ayr  in  Scotland,  where  dis- 
agreeable climate  and  poor,  thin  soils  produce  coarse  and  scanty  forage. 
The  striking  contrast  in  characteristics  between  the  Dutch  or  Holstein- 
Friesian  cattle  and  the  Jersey  is  doubtless  due  also  in  part  to  the  differ- 
ence in  geographic  environment.  The  native  home  of  the  Holstein- 
Friesian  cattle  is  that  portion  of  the  Netherlands  lying  contiguous  to 
the  North  Sea,  where  the  climate  is  cool  and  moist  and  the  soil  is  a 
heavy  clay,  which  induces  a  luxuriant  growth  of  grass  carrying  a  high 
percentage  of  water  and  a  corresponding  low  content  of  nutrient  sub- 
stance. The  cows  calve  during  the  spring  months,  and  during  their 
heaviest  milking  period  are  obliged  to  obtain  the  needed  sustenance 
from  luxuriant  but  watery  grass.  As  a  result  of  this  necessity  there 
has  been  developed  a  cow  having  a  large  abdomen  with  a  corresponding 
large  digestive  capacity.  The  cows  also  are  large  in  size  and  their 
bony  structure  somewhat  coarse  and  angular.  Perhaps  as  a  result  of 
these  large  quantities  of  watery  food,  the  flow  of  milk  is  larger  in 
quantity  and  lower  in  percentage  of  butter  fat  and  other  solids  than 
the  milk  of  other  improved  dairy  breeds. 

Quite  opposite  are  those  conditions  under  which  the  Jersey  cattle 
have  developed.  Their  native  isle  possesses  a  mild  climate  much  drier 
than  that  of  Holland.  The  soil  is  a  light  loam  and  carries  an  herbage 
not  abundant,  but  comparatively  high  in  nutritive  substance  and  low 
in  water  content.  At  no  time  is  the  Jersey  obliged  to  consume  large 
quantities  of  succulent  food.  The  character  of  the  food-supply  has 
doubtless  been  one  factor  in  developing  a  body  of  moderate  size  and 
rather  fine  bony  structure.  Environment,  food,  and  selection  by  the 
breeder  have  resulted  in  making  the  Jersey  cow  a  moderate  producer  of 
milk  that  is  richer  in  fat  and  in  other  solids  than  the  milk  of  any  other 
breed  of  cattle.* 

The  nomads,  such  as  the  Kirghiz,  who  follow  their  flocks 
across  the  steppes  and  mountains  of  the  southern  part  of  Asiatic 
Russia,  probably  depend  more  upon  milk  and  its  products  than 
any  other  people.  Aside  from  these  roving  herds,  milk  produc- 
tion is  at  a  low  ebb  in  lands  of  little  rainfall,  or  of  summer 
drought,  such  as  we  find  in  California  and  the  Mediterranean 
countries,  because  of  the  scarcity  of  grass.  During  the  months 
of  summer  drought,  the  cost  of  supplying  milk  animals  with 
green  and  succulent  food  is  so  great  as  to  make  milk  relatively 
expensive  and  something  of  a  luxury. 

*  Finch  and  Baker:  Geography  of  the  World's  Agriculture,  p.  119. 


THE  LIVING  MILK  WAGON  249 

The  small  quantity  of  milk  that  is  used,  chiefly  by  children, 
in  the  dry  summer  countries  of  Europe  is  largely  supplied  by 
goats,  which  can  live  on  a  poorer  and  drier  diet  than  is  possible 
for  the  cow.  In  all  Greece  there  are  but  four  thousand  cows, 
most  of  them  near  Athens.  Goat's  milk  is  more  important,  and 
cheese  of  sheep's  milk,  common  throughout  the  Mediterranean,  is 
here  an  important  commodity.  The  Valchian  breed  of  Greek  sheep 
will  give  twelve  ounces  of  milk  per  head  per  day  for  six  months. 
Italy  produces  one  hundred  and  twenty  million  gallons  of  sheep 
milk  per  year,  mostly  for  cheese.  Some  varieties  of  milk  goats 
in  Mediterranean  countries  give  a  greater  amount  of  milk  in 
proportion  to  their  weight  and  food  consumed  than  does  any 
other  milk  producer.  Furthermore,  goat's  milk  is  richer  than 
cow's  milk  in  both  fat  and  solids.  One  of  the  characteristic 
street  scenes  in  these  countries  is  the  milkman  driving  herds  of 
goats  through  the  street  and  milking  them  at  the  door  of  the 
customer,  being  able  thus  to  guarantee  the  absolute  freshness 
and  purity  of  the  milk.  He  also  avoids  the  difficulties  of  keeping 
his  bottles  clean,  and  the  even  greater  difficulty  of  cooling  milk 
in  a  country  without  the  cool  springs  or  ice  that  are  so  indis- 
pensable to  the  commercial  dairy. 

CHARACTERISTICS   AND  LOCATION  OP  THE  DAIRY   PRODUCT 

Dairying  as  an  important  industry  depends  chiefly  upon  cow's 
milk,  although  the  goat  and  sheep  are  minor  helpers.  It  has 
arisen  in  lands  of  moderate  coolness  where  the  rainfall  is  suf- 
ficient to  produce  the  succulent  grass  and  other  forage  required 
by  cows  if  they  are  to  give  profitable  quantities  of  milk.  Owing 
to  the  bulk,  weight,  and  perishable  nature  of  milk,  it  must  be 
produced  near  the  market  if  it  is  to  be  consumed  while  fresh. 
The  great  demand  for  fresh  milk  in  the  vicinity  of  New  York 
City  has  caused  milk  to  be  brought  nearly  four  hundred  miles 
in  special  express  trains,  such  as  those  running  from  Wayne 
County,  Pennsylvania,  and  from  the  banks  of  the  St.  Lawrence 
to  New  York  City.  The  supply  for  the  city  of  Philadelphia 
comes  from  points  as  far  away  as  the  shores  of  Lake  Erie,  Lake 
Ontario,  and  the  Chesapeake  Bay.  This  condition,  however,  is 
exceptional,  and  it  may  be  said  that  the  number  of  cows  in- 


250 


DAIRY  PRODUCTS 


creases  with  the  density  of  population  in  the  United  States  and 
northwestern  Europe.  Thus  New  York,  our  Empire  State,  long 
led  all  other  states  in  its  number  of  milch  cows;  and  Pennsyl- 


Fio.  83. — Sources  of  milk  and  cream  supply  of  Detroit,  and  tlie 
steam  and  electric  railways  over  which  most  of  it  is  transported  to  the 
city. 

vania,  second  in  population,  ranks  high  in  the  number  of  milch 
cows. 

In  both  states  the  dairy  industry  has  been  seriously  disturbed 
by  the  Great  War,  and  the  number  of  cows  has  declined.  The 
farm  laborer  has  been  drawn  to  the  munition  plants,  shipyards, 


THE  SMALL  AMERICAN   EXPORT 


251 


81611 


o  — 


-  ,    w 

—  c 


or  mines,  so  that  the  farmer  has  sometimes 
had  to  send  his  cows  to  the  butcher.  Penn- 
sylvania had  lost  fifteen  per  cent,  of  her 
cows  between  1910  and  1918,  New  York 
fourteen  per  cent.,  but  there  were  increases 
in  more  distant  states,  especially  Minnesota, 
Wisconsin,  and  North  Dakota,  where  there 
was  less  opportunity  to  work  in  munitions 
plants. 

Fortunately  for  the  supplying  of  distant 
localities  there  aro  now  good  methods  of 
condensing  and  preserving  dairy  products. 
That  part  of  the  milk  which  separates  as 
cream  can  be  condensed  into  butter  and  kept 
for  weeks,  or,  in  cold  storage,  for  months; 
the  milk  can  be  converted  into  fleecy  curds 
and  the  curds  into  cheese  which  keeps  for 
months;  and,  by  the  processes  called  con- 
densation and  evaporation,  along  with  her- 
metic sealing,  milk  can  be  reduced  in  bulk 
and  canned  so  that  it  will  keep  for  years. 
Last  and  perhaps  best  of  all  was  the  dis- 
covery (1900)  of  the  method  of  evaporating 
milk  completely  and  reducing  it  to  a  pow- 
der; while  condensed  milk  takes  up  from 
one-half  to  one-fifth  the  bulk  of  the  natural 
article,  and  requires  tin  for  its  preservation, 
dried  whole  milk  takes  but  one-eighth  of  its 
original  space,  and  dried  skim  milk  but  one- 
twelfth.  In  1911  ten  plants  were  manu- 
facturing dried  milk  in  the  United  States, 
producing  eight  million  pounds.  Doubtless 
its  importance  will  greatly  increase;  for 
dietitians  report  that  it  is  soluble  in  water 
and  as  digestible  as  fresh  milk.  Man  is  now 
no  longer  dependent  upon  his  neighborhood 
for  his  milk  supply.  Many  parts  of  the 
world  hitherto  unaccustomed  to  dairy  prod- 
ucts have,  since  the  development  of  world 


252 


DAIRY  PRODUCTS 


commerce,  adopted  them.  The  West  Indian  planter  opens 
tins  of  Danish  butter  in  Jamaica  or  Porto  Rico,  while 
condensed  milk  is  to  be  found  in  the  uttermost  ends  of 
the  world  where  it  is  too  hot  to  produce  and  keep  milk,  as  in 
Guiana  and  equatorial  Africa;  or  too  dry,  as  in  parts  of  Cape 
Colony;  or  too  cold,  as  in  Alaska;  or  too  mountainous,  as  in 


FIQ.  85. — Ammonia  pipes  cooling  a  car  for  the  shipment  of  milk 
•     to  market.     (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr. ) 

Rocky  Mountain  mining  towns ;  or  wherever  camper,  prospector, 
or  lumberman  pitches  his  tent  or  builds  his  shack.  During  the 
Great  War  condensed  milk  has  sprung  into  a  prominence  hitherto 
undreamed.  It  has  saved  millions  of  lives.  In  Belgium  three 
months  of  German  occupancy  reduced  the  number  of  cows  from 
1,800,000  to  700,000.  At  that  point  the  protests  of  the  Relief 
Commission  checked  the  reduction,  but  in  northern  France  abso- 
lutely all  the  cattle  were  taken  before  the  Relief  Commission 
arrived. 


We  have  therefore,  for  nearly  four  years  been  sending  them  Ameri- 
can condensed  milk,  not  in  single  cans,  but  by  scores  of  thousands  of 


DAIRY  MACHINERY  253 

tons.  There  has  been  scarcely  a  child  born  in  the  north  of  France,  and 
this  is  true  of  many  in  Belgium,  whose  continued  life  has  not  been 
dependent  during  all  this  period  upon  American  condensed  milk. 
Every  American  would  be  thrilled  could  he  but  see  the  gratitude  which 
French  mothers  daily  express  over  the  pitiable  ration  which  enables 
their  children  to  survive.* 

It  is  easy  to  see  how  condensed  milk  in  cans  is  about  the  only 
form  in  which  this  product  could  reach  the  American  soldiers,  in 
the  French  camps  and  villages. 

The  war  has  taught  us  many  things  about  food,  among  them 
is  increased  appreciation  of  milk.f 

RECENT    IMPROVEMENTS    IN    MANUFACTURE 

Within  a  few  decades  great  improvements  have  been  made  in 
the  manufacture  of  dairy  products.  The  cooling  of  milk  for- 
merly required  much  labor  and  care.  The  milk  had  to  be  set 
away  in  shallow  pans  for  a  day  or  two  before  the  cream  could 
be  skimmed  off.  Now  a  little  machine  called  a  centrifugal  sepa- 
rator, often  operated  by  hand,  takes  the  fresh  milk  as  it  comes 
from  the  cow,  and  by  centrifugal  force  separates  the  cream  into 
one  vessel  and  the  milk  into  another.  The  little  hand  churn  of 
the  kitchen  is  being  used  less  and  less  as  big,  steam-driven  churns 
in  the  butter  factory  (creamery)  make  more  and  more  of  the 
butter  of  the  world.  Most  of  the  cheese  is  now  also  made  in 
factories  rather  than  upon  the  farms  of  the  people  who  keep 
the  cows — another  victory  in  the  long  series  of  conquests  of 
the  factory  over  home  industry — conquests  of  machinery  over 
drudgery. 

*  From  address  of  Herbert  Hoover,  National  Milk  and  Dairy  Farm  Ex- 
position, New  York,  May  23,  1018 

t "  Another  impressive  observation  brought  out  by  food  difficulties  ia 
that  of  our  intimate  dependence  on  our  domestic  animals.  We  are  likely 
to  think  first  of  the  supply  of  cereals,  and,  indeed,  it  must  be  admitted 
that  bread  is  the  very  basis  of  the  food  supply  of  a  people.  But  we  do 
not  sufficiently  realize  the  rqually  critical  importance  of  maintenance  of 
our  domestic  animals  in  a  period  of  food  shortage.  We  cannot  even  raise 
our  own  young  without  them.  Nor  if  a  nation  is  robbed  of  its  animals 
can  you  keep  the  death  rate  of  that  nation  down  to  normal  by  simple 
importation  of  animal  products.  Hence  one  of  the  greatest  problems  in 
a  beleaguered  nation  is  that  of  the  preservation  of  its  herds." — Kellogg  and 
Taylor:  The  Food  Problem,  p.  vii. 


254  DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

DAIRYING    AND    INTENSIFICATION    OP    AGRICULTURE 

Dairying  marks  an  important  stage  in  the  intensification  of 
agriculture,  or  the  increase  of  the  income  from  a  given  piece  of 
land.  There  are  two  ways  by  which  a  farmer  may  increase  pro- 
duction. One  is  to  take  more  land,  which  often  cannot  be  had; 
the  other,  to  put  more  care  and  labor  on  the  land  he  has.  Where 
the  population  is  sparse,  little  land  is  needed  to  produce  the  food, 
the  price  of  land  is  low,  and  the  farmer  can  pay  interest  on  its 
small  value  by  cultivating  a  small  part  of  it,  with  a  minimum 
amount  of  labor,  and  pasturing  the  rest.  New  countries  are 
therefore  rarely  dairy  countries.  The  Great  Plains  of  the  United 
States  are  an  excellent  illustration.  There  are  millions  of  cows, 
but  not  enough  butter,  milk,  and  cheese  for  the  use  of  the  people. 
The  cow,  with  little  care  from  her  owner,  runs  on  the  great 
range,  and  the  calf  which  drinks  all  of  her  milk  may  never  be 
seen  by  the  owner  until  the  day  the  animal  is  branded  or  sold. 
The  plains  of  central  Kansas  afford  another  example  of  extensive 
agriculture;  in  this  instance  wheat  is  the  product.  Wheat  lands 
of  low  price  make  good  returns  with  small  labor,  small  expense, 
and  low  yield.  In  New  York  and  other  Eastern  States,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  land  is  hilly,  the  farms  are  small,  and  the  farmer 
cannot  grow  grain  so  cheaply  as  does  his  brother  upon  the  flat 
lands  of  Canada.  His  farm  is  so  small  and  high-priced  that 
he  cannot  raise  enough  cattle  to  support  him  if  he  uses  the 
method  of  the  beef  producer  of  the  plains.  (See  table  of  Beef 
Cattle  and  Cows  in  1912-18.)  But  a  few  cows  eating  his  pasture 
grass,  his  hay,  his  corn  fodder,  and  much  of  his  grain  will  day 
by  day  produce  enough  milk  to  yield  him  a  comfortable  income. 
Therefore  New  York,  having  a  market  within  reach,  produces 
vast  quantities  of  market  milk  and  also  ranks  high  in  the  manu- 
facture of  butter  and  condensed  milk.  As  these  latter  products, 
concentrated  and  easy  to  transport,  tend  to  come  from  locations 
somewhat  remote  from  the  large  cities,  their  production  is  mov- 
ing westward  and  replacing  the  less  intensive  meat  industry. 
(See  table,  p.  255.)  The  table  on  page  256,  which  shows  that 
the  milk  farmers  produce  four  times  as  much  food  per  acre  as 
do  the  beef  farmers,  illustrates  in  another  way  the  intensity  of 
the  dairy  industry. 


THE  COMPETITION  OF  BEEF  AND  MILK 

BEEF  CATTLE  AND  COWS 
(January  1,  1912-January  1,  1918) 


255 


Milch    COWS, 

thousands 

Other  cattle, 
thousands 

1'er  cent  of 
cows  to 
other  cattle 

Populous  East: 
New  Jersey   

1912 

150 
1,495 
943 

806 
1,504 
1,107 
272 
1,393 

698 
822 
1,034 

32 
35 

1918 

152 
1,524 
960 

874 
1,785 
1,328 
434 
1,405 

945 
910 
1,128 

87 
64 

1912 

68 
894 
627 

701 
1,146 
1,151 
446 
2,773 

1,872 
2,773 
5,177 

741 

568 

1918 

74 
1,005 
717 

752 
1,394 
1,540 
650 
2,919 

2,354 
1.782 
4,660 

1,037 
891 

1912 

221 
167 
150 

115 
131 
96  I 
609 
50 

37 
30 
20 

4 
6 

1918 

205 
152 
134 

117 
130 
86.2 
667 
48 

40 
51 
24 

8 
7 

New  York  

Pennsylvania   

North  Central  Dairy  Belt: 
Michigan     

Wisconsin   

Minnesota    

North  Dakota  

Iowa    

Cattle  Fattening  States: 
Kansas    

Missouri   

Texas  

Range  States: 
Arizona  

Wyoming    

Wisconsin  is  now  the  leading  dairy  state;  it  displaced  New 
York  in  1912  and  gained  rapidly  because  of  the  war.  Minnesota, 
showing  nineteen  per  cent,  increase  in  the  number  of  cows  in  1918 
over  the  number  in  1912,  and  North  Dakota,  with  sixty  per  cent, 
increase,  show  the  most  conspicuous  recent  dairy  gains  in  the 
United  States.  Before  the  war,  dairying  was  steadily  increasing 
in  the  northern  section  of  the  corn-belt,  though  both  Iowa  and 
Illinois  show  a  recent  decline  in  comparison  to  beef  cattle,  almost 
certainly  temporary  and  due  to  the  enormous  prices  being  paid 
for  meat.  The  dairy  industry  has  been  steadily  gaining  over 
the  meat  industry  in  this  region,  on  account  of  the  high  value  of 
land.  The  values  of  farm  lands  in  the  North-Central  States  have 
in  many  districts  doubled  in  the  first  ten  years  of  this  century, 
on  account  of  the  high  prices  of  corn  and  meat,  due  to  the  limited 
amount  of  good  land  and  the  steadily  increasing  demand,  which 
has  greatly  enhanced  farm  values  and  has  given  a  certain  specu- 
lative value  to  farms  in  that  region. 

The  farmer  there  now  buys  an  expensive  farm.  If  he  keeps 
cattle  and  sells  beef,  he  has  difficulty  in  earning  the  interest  on 


256 


DAIRY  PRODUCTS 


his  investment.  If  he  sends  milk  to  the  creamery  or  cheese  fac- 
tory, the  cow  each  year  gives  a  value  in  milk  equal  to  or  greater 
than  the  value  of  the  bullock  in  meat  at  the  end  of  his  two  or 
three  years  of  life — and  the  meat-producing  steer  eats  as  much 
as  the  milk-producing  cow.  Thus,  the  greater  intensity  of  milk 
production  causes  it  to  displace  meat  production.  The  table  of 
cattle  in  1912  and  1918  shows  an  interesting  and  suggestive 


os  than 
100  cows 


100-200 


200-300 


400-500 


500-600 


over  600 


FlG.  86. — Milch  cows  in   United  States  per   1,000  inhabitants,  by  states, 
January  1,  1912.      (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.)      Pop.,  1910. 

difference  in  ratio  of  dairy  to  other  cattle  as  we  go  west  and 
away  from  markets. 

In  dairying  the  farm  becomes  a  kind  of  factory,  using  its  own 
raw  materials.  A  certain  amount  of  hay,  corn,  and  bran  may 
with  little  labor  be  turned  into  beef  worth  more  than  its  cash 
value.  Twenty  typical  steers  in  300  days  will  gain  13,500 
pounds  of  weight,  of  which  sixty  per  cent,  is  edible;  the  same 
food  in  twenty  cows  of  similar  quality  may  produce  120,000 
pounds  of  milk,  but  much  greater  labor  is  required  in  the  care 
and  daily  milking  of  the  herd  of  twenty  cows.  Dairying  often 
doubles  or  trebles  the  number  of  families  living  on  the  same 


WHAT  MAKES  DAIRYING  257 

farm  and  enables  dairy  districts  to  produce  more  food  and  sup- 
port a  larger  population  than  meat-  or  grain-selling  districts. 
Farmers  in  some  parts  of  North  Dakota  have  been  driven  into 
the  dairy  business  because  the  Canada  thistle  choked  out  the 
wheat  crop  and  broke  up  bonanza  wheat  growing  or  one-crop 
farming.  This  apparent  disaster  proved  to  be  an  economic 
blessing  in  disguise.  The  farmers  were  compelled  to  rotate  crops 
(which  killed  out  the  thistle)  and,  instead  of  wheat,  to  raise 
forage  crops  and  then  keep  cows  to  dispose  of  the  product.  This 
intensification  of  production  increased  the  farm  income  and  in  a 
few  years  raised  value  of  land  from  $15  per  acre  for  wheat  farms 
to  $25  per  acre  for  dairy  farms. 

Wisconsin  and  the  lower  peninsula  of  Michigan  developed  a 
greater  and  earlier  dependence  on  dairy  products  than  the  states 
of  the  corn-belt  proper  because  their  cooler  climate  and  rougher 
land  are  not  so  well  adapted  to  corn,  and  therefore  the  people 
have  been  compelled  to  turn  earlier  from  grain  growing  and 
make  their  land  profitable  by  other  means,  such  as  potato  growing 
and  dairying.  In  Wisconsin,  the  State  University  has,  through 
its  school  of  agriculture,  given  conspicuous  aid  to  the  dairy  in- 
dustry by  investigations,  lectures,  bulletins,  and  class-room  work. 
It  has  thus  spread  among  farmers  a  working  knowledge  of  the 
most  scientific  and  profitable  methods  of  dairying,  and  it  has 
been  an  important  factor  in  bringing  the  state  to  leadership  in 
this  industry.  In  1909  there  were  2,969  creameries  and  cheese 
factories  in  Wisconsin,  and  since  that  date  the  business  has 
steadily  grown. 

CANADIAN   DAIRYING 

That  part  of  Canada  bounded  by  Lake  Huron,  the  city  of 
Quebec,  and  the  American  boundary,  comprising  the  populous 
parts  of  Ontario  and  Quebec,  is  like  Wisconsin  and  New  York 
in  its  inability  to  compete  with  the  warm  and  level  West  as  a 
gror/er  of  either  corn  or  small  grain.  Consequently  the  people 
have  long  since  turned  to  dairying  with  great  success,  and  are 
the  leaders  in  that  great  industry.  Canada  had  3,446  factories 
(1916)  where  butter  and  cheese,  especially  cheese,  are  manu- 
factured from  the  milk  supply  of  221,000  farmers.  Great  care 


258 


DAIRY  PRODUCTS 


is  taken  to  maintain  the  high  quality  of  the  product,  and  it  is 
consequently  much  esteemed  in  Great  Britain,  whither  four- 
fifths  of  the  cheese  goes,  making  up  half  of  the  British  import 
of  that  article.  Canadian  competition,  together  with  the  inferior 
quality  and  bad  repute  of  American  cheese,  had  greatly  lessened 
the  export  of  the  American  product  before  the  Great  "War. 

The  Canadian  experience  is  an  excellent  example  of  the  modern 
way  of  acquiring  an  industry.  The  Canadian  Government  sent 
experts  to  Britain  to  find  what  kind  of  cheese  was  wanted  in  the 
old  country.  Then  they  came  back  and  established  dairy  schools 
to  teach  the  people  of  Canada  how  to  give  the  cheese  the  com- 
position, color,  flavor,  and  age  required  in  the  British  markets. 
The  government  controls  export  by  having  inspectors  pass  upon 
and  stamp  all  exported  cheese,  so  that  its  quality  is  unques- 
tioned. Meanwhile  the  term  "Yankee  cheese"  has  become  a 
term  of  opprobrium,  because  sometimes  the  outside  was  good 
and  the  inside  not  so  good.  There  is  no  American  inspection 
and  each  man  can  do  as  he  pleases.  This  is  not  the  way  to 
develop  export  trade  in  dairy  products,  as  is  shown  by  the 
experience  of  Denmark,  Australia,  and  New  Zealand,  as  well  as 
Canada. 


INTERNATIONAL  TRADE  IN  DAIRY  PRODUCTS   (1913) 


EXPORTS 


Country 


Kul.  tor  Cheese 
million  million 
pounds  pounds 


Argentina 8 

Australia    76 

New  Zealand 41             68 

Canada    1           148 

Denmark     200 

Finland 27 

Russia 172               8 

France 38             31 

Holland     81           145 

Italy    6             72 

Sweden    43 

Switzerland    —            78 

United  States    ....  3               2 


IMPORTS 


Country 


Butter  Cheese 
million  million 
pounds  pounds 


Argentina —  11 

Belgium    14  35 

Austria-Hungary...  14  13 

Brazil    4  4 

British  South  Africa  3  5 

France 13  51 

Germany 119  57 

Italy    —  12 

Switzerland    11  7 

United  Kingdom   ...  451  249 

United  States    .  —  55 


That  dairying  is  an  industry  of  intensive  agriculture  which 
America  has  not  largely  developed  is  shown  by  the  insignificance 


DAIRYING  AND  THE  SMALL  FARM  259 

of  our  exports  (see  table  above)  before  the  war  in  comparison 
with  those  of  such  countries  as  Sweden,  Holland,  and  Denmark. 
The  increase  in  our  dairy  exports,  due  to  the  war,  has  been  very 
rapid,  but  is  probably  only  temporary. 


DAIRYING    IN    NORTHWESTERN    EUROPE 

Northwestern  Europe,  with  its  fertile  soil,  cool  climate,  pas- 
ture-producing summer  rains,  and  dense  population,  has  every 
requirement  of  a  great  dairy  region,  and  the  scarcity  of  meat 
causes  cheese  to  be  used  far  more  than  in  meat-eating  America. 
Two  hundred  and  forty-two  kinds  of  cheese,  most  of  them  Euro- 
pean, are  recorded  in  a  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture 
Bulletin.  The  European  demand  for  cheese  and  butter  is  so 
great  that  Canada  and  other  parts  of  the  world  supplement  the 
enormous  home  production.  England  and  Wales — an  area 
smaller  than  Missouri,  but  with  a  population  about  a  third  that 
of  the  United  States — consume  in  fresh  form  a  large  part  of  the; 
milk  that  is  produced  at  home.  Ireland,  on  the  other  hand, 
with  a  sparser  population  and  a  better  grass  supply,  because  of 
the  damper  climate,  is  too  far  away  to  send  milk  to  England,  but 
sends  large  quantities  of  butter  to  help  supply  the  huge  demands 
of  the  English  people,  with  whom  bread  and  butter  is  an  im- 
portant article  of  diet.  Consequently  the  British  import  more 
butter  and  cheese  than  any  other  half-dozen  nations.  (See  table 
of  international  trade  in  dairy  products.)  Only  twenty-seven 
per  cent,  of  the  Canadian  milk  is  used  as  milk,  while  in  the 
United  Kingdom  this  figure  rises  to  seventy  per  cent.  An  im- 
portant source  of  British  supply  was  the  great  continental  dairy- 
belt  which  stretches  along  the  northern  plain  of  Europe  from 
western  France  to  Denmark,  Sweden,  and  Russia.  Throughout 
this  whole  belt  the  farms  are  small,  the  rural  population  is  dense, 
and,  while  grain  is  raised  on  most  of  the  farms,  the  keeping  of 
dairy  cows  is  also  exceedingly  common. 

The  north  of  France  makes  much  excellent  butter  that  goes  in 
normal  times  to  the  great  capitals,  London  and  Paris.  The 
Channel  Islands  between  England  and  France,  with  daily 
steamers  to  London,  have  so  long  been  important  dairy  centers 
that  each  of  them,  Alderney,  Jersey,  and  Guernsey,  has  given 


260  DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

its  name  to  a  breed  of  dairy  cattle  now  widely  scattered  over  the 
world.  The  town  of  Camembert  in  Normandy  has  given  its  name 
to  a  well-known  brand  of  cheese  and  in  the  south  of  France  is 
the  town  of  Roquefort,  where  for  generations  the  peasants  have 
handed  down  from  father  to  son  the  art  of  making  from  sheep 's 
milk  their  famous  cheese,  which  is  ripened  in  stone  caverns  deep 
under  the  ground.  Goat's  milk  from  the  herds  that  browse 
beneath  the  chestnut  trees  on  the  steep  mountain  sides  of  Corsica 
is  regularly  taken  to  the  south  of  France  for  manufacture  into 
famous  cheeses. 

Holland  has  been  noted  for  its  cattle  since  the  days  of  Julius 
Caesar.  Meadows,  which  the  Dutchman  has  won  from  the  sea  by 
pumping  out  the  water,  are  formed  from  the  rich  mud  that  the 
Ehine  has  brought  down  from  the  highlands  of  central  Europe. 
These  moist,  rich  lands,  too  wet  for  tillage,  close  to  the  sea  with 
its  grass-producing  air,  make  very  rich  pastures.  Here  drainage 
ditches  separate  the  little  green  fields,  dotted  with  feed  boxes 
from  which  the  black  and  white  cows  eat  bran  and  grains  im- 
ported from  America.  By  this  means  farmers  increase  the 
number  of  cows  they  can  keep.  When  embargoes  cut  off  the 
supply  of  imported  cow  food,  as  in  1917,  the  farmers  had  to 
send  their  cows  to  the  butchers  by  the  thousands.  In  damp  and 
cloudy  weather  the  cows  are  blanketed  in  the  pastures  (United 
States  Consular  Eeport,  January  16,  1911).  These  richly  fed 
and  carefully  tended  herds  of  the  well-known  Frisian  or  Holstein 
breed  give  vast  quantities  of  milk  which  makes  dairy  products 
the  chief  of  all  the  farm  products  of  well-tilled  little  Holland. 
The  Dutch  make  twenty-four  pounds  of  butter  per  capita  per 
year.  This  is  several  pounds  more  than  we  make  in  the  United 
States,  but  the  Dutch  being  poorer  eat  less  of  it  per  capita  than 
we  do.  Their  cheese  output  exceeds  that  of  butter.  The  town 
of  Edam,  west  of  the  Zuyder  Zee,  has  given  its  name  to  a  kind 
of  cheese  produced  largely  in  that  part  of  Holland;  this  cheese, 
along  with  other  Dutch  brands,  goes  in  normal  times  to  England, 
to  the  United  States,  and  even  to  South  Africa  and  many  other 
countries  where  the  fame  of  Dutch  cheeses  has  spread.  Germany 
secured  most  of  this  food  during  the  war  because  she  could 
give  Holland  coal  and  iron.  England  could  not.  Sweet  butter 
also  goes  in  large  quantities  from  Holland  to  England,  but  in 


DANISH  SKILL  AT  DAIRYING  261 

the  production  of  this  commodity  Denmark  is  the  teacher  of 
the  world. 

That  little  country,  about  half  the  size  of  Maine,  is  visited  by 
the  agricultural  scientists  of  all  the  world  who  would  learn  in 
its  best  form  the  art  of  dairying.  Forty  years  ago  she  was  a 
meat  exporter  to  Great  Britain,  but  the  demand  for  more  prod- 
ucts has  turned  this  democratic  kingdom  into  a  vast  dairy  farm. 
The  Danish  peasant  owns  a  farm  of  from  five  to  twenty-five 
acres.  The  land  is  usually  sandy  and  was  originally  poor,  but 
has  become  rich  by  good  care  and  imported  fertility  in  the  form 
of  cow  foods.  More  than  half  the  land  tilled  is  in  oats,  hay, 
grass,  and  root  crops  to  feed  the  cows.  The  land  used  to  pro- 
duce forage  has  encroached  upon  the  grain  fields  until  there  is 
not  wheat  land  enough  to  supply  bread.  The  harvest  of  1910 
was  valued  at  147  million  dollars;  of  this  44  million  was  root 
crops  (largely  cattle  food)  and  62  million  grain  (largely  oats 
and  barley  for  cattle).  In  addition  quantities  of  grain  and 
grain  products  are  imported  from  America  and  Argentina  to 
feed  the  cows.*  As  a  result  of  her  great  dairy  industry,  Den- 
mark with  a  poorer  soil  rivals  Holland  in  having  more  farm 
animals  for  its  area  than  any  other  country  of  the  world ;  there 
are  more  than  a  thousand  factories  for  making  butter;  the 
cows  are  inspected  once  a  month  to  insure  healthy  stock;  and 
the  dread  disease  of  tuberculosis,  so  common  among  housed  cattle 
of  the  entire  world,  has  been  entirely  stamped  out  of  the  king- 
dom of  Denmark.  Over  $50,000,000  worth  of  butter  was  sent 
each  year  to  Great  Britain  alone  before  the  war,  but  now  Ger- 
many for  a  time  gets  much  of  the  reduced  export.  The  price  re- 
ceived for  his  product  by  the  Danish  dairy  farmer  in  peace  times 
is  less  than  that  received  by  the  British  farmer,  who  sends  milk 
to  the  city  populations  near  at  hand.  This  difference  in  price  of 
milk  for  the  two  purposes  is  common  in  most  dairy  districts. 
Through  careful  catering  to  the  demands  of  the  market,  Danish 
butter  preserved  in  tin  cans  has  become  the  standard  article  for 


*  The  Allies  greatly  reduced  the  supplies  of  stock-food  to  Denmark, 
Norway,  and  Sweden,  as  well  as  Holland,  in  1917,  because  of  their  exporta- 
tion of  meat  and  dairy  products  to  Germany,  with  the  result  that  herds 
were  greatly  diminished;  but  this  condition  will  naturally  be  temporary, 
disappearing  with  the  disturbances  in  trade  brought  about  by  the  war. 


262  DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

consumption  in  the  tropics  and  in  all  the  remote  corners  of  the 
globe  where  there  is  no  local  supply. 

The  southern  parts  of  Sweden,  which  are  not  far  from  Den- 
mark, have  also  recently  learned  the  art  of  making  good  butter ; 
and  the  country,  which  in  1870  was  a  butter  importer,  is  rapidly 
increasing  its  butter  exports  to  Great  Britain,  over  $6,000,000 
worth  being  shipped  there  annually  before  the  war. 

THE  INTENSITY  OF  EUROPEAN  DAIRY  FARMING 

Dairying  is  also  carried  on  to  a  very  large  extent  in  northern 
and  western  Germany,  but  the  large  population  consumes  the 
entire  product  despite  the  fact  that  dairying  there,  as  in  France 
and  other  northern  European  countries,  is  carried  on  in  its  most 
intensive  form  with  the  cows  kept  in  barns  and  food  brought  to 
them.  In  such  a  dairy  district  near  Cologne,  farm  lands  were 
worth  $400  to  $680  per  acre  before  the  war. 

Switzerland  has  an  interesting  and  unique  dairy  industry. 
Eelatively  large  areas  of  land  upon  the  high  mountains,  habit- 
able only  in  summer,  produce  an  abundance  of  rich  grass  as  the 
melting  snow  recedes  and  lets  sunshine  reach  the  saturated  earth. 
The  villagers  of  the  valleys  take  their  herds  of  cows  and  goats 
to  the  higher  pastures  in  summer  and,  because  of  the  distance, 
stay  with  them  through  the  whole  season,  spending  the  nights  in 
little  huts  built  for  the  purpose.  At  intervals  members  of  their 
families  bring  up  the  necessary  supplies  and  take  away  the  ac- 
cumulations of  cheese  and  butter  which  the  herders  have  pro- 
duced. For  the  more  rugged  parts  of  these  pastures,  the  Swiss 
have  developed  several  breeds  of  very  productive  milch  goats, 
whose  rich  milk  is  sometimes  mixed  with  skimmed  cow's  milk 
to  make  cheese.  On  the  lower  slopes  of  the  Alps  the  water  from 
snow  field  and  glacier  is  often  led  out  over  the  fields  to  fer- 
tilize and  irrigate  the  grass  for  winter  hay.  As  a  result  of 
this  careful  industry,  Switzerland  is  an  exporter  of  good  cheese, 
Neufchatel  being  one  of  the  best-known  brands.  She  also  sold 
nearly  $2  per  capita  per  year  of  condensed  milk  before  the 
war,  some  of  it  going  to  England,  to  India,  and  even  to  Canada. 
Milk  is  also  an  important  factor  in  the  manufacture  of  milk- 
chocolate,  in  which  Switzerland  (like  Holland)  excels,  sending 


DAIRYING  AND  LABOR  263 

abroad  annually  about  three-fourths  of  the  total  product,  valued 
at  ,$10,000,000,  a  larger  figure  per  capita  than  the  normal  grain 
export  of  the  United  States. 

Italy  is  a  land  of  summer  drought  where  commercial  dairying 
is  in  the  main  limited  to  the  irrigated  lands  of  the  Po  Valley. 
The  Alpine  streams  furnish  water  for  the  succulent  pastures 
and  hay  crops  which  are  responsible  for  the  few  brands  of  Italian 
cheeses  that  are  well  known  in  many  countries  of  the  world. 
One  of  these,  the  Parmesan  cheese,  is  made  of  goat's  milk. 
Cheaper  cheeses  are  imported  into  Italy  to  feed  her  own  people 
just  as  the  Dutch  and  Danes  import  oleomargarine  from  Chicago 
for  their  own  use  and  sell  the  butter  they  make. 

Oleomargarine,  a  butter  substitute,  has  virtually  the  same 
chemical  analyses  and  calorie  value  as  butter.  Being  made 
chiefly  from  suet  (body  fat  of  beef)  the  probabilities  of  cleanli- 
ness of  manufacture  are  better  than  in  butter  making.  The 
opposition  to  its  sale  arose  from  the  fact  that  it  was  sold  at  a 
fictitious  value  under  a  false  name.  The  dairyman  will  doubt- 
less soon  be  starting  another  campaign  based  on  the  fact  that 
oleomargarine  does  not  contain  the  vitamines  (fat  soluble  A)  to 
be  found  in  butter. 

The  comparison  of  dairy  exports  (see  table)  from  the  United 
States — vast,  rich,  and  agricultural — and  from  mountainous  and 
populous  little  Switzerland,  with  half  her  used  land  in  hay,  is 
striking  even  in  absolute  quantities.  On  the  per  capita  basis, 
Swiss  cheese  and  milk  exports  exceed  the  entire  exports  of  the 
United  States  in  grain  and  grain  products,  animals  and  animal 
products.  Thus  the  Switzer,  like  the  Dane,  makes  the  most 
of  his  limited  opportunities  and  the  American,  with  more  re- 
sources, lets  many  opportunities  go  to  waste.  It  is  evident  that 
commercial  dairying  depends  more  on  the  distribution  of  laborers 
(density  of  agricultural  population)  than  on  resources,  so  that 
production  may  be  large  in  a  place  not  necessarily  best  fitted  for 
it.  In  dairy  possibilities  America  greatly  exceeds  Europe.  One 
basis  of  American  superiority  over  Europe  as  a  place  for  the 
dairy  industry  is  the  priceless  boon  of  corn,  the  king  of  forage 
crops  (especially  as  silage),  for  which  the  people  of  all  European 
dairy  regions  must  substitute  the  laboriously  produced  beets  and 
other  root  crops  and  the  less  productive  barley.  The  American 


264 


DAIRY  PRODUCTS 


cotton-belt  has  even  better  dairy  possibilities  than  the  corn-belt, 
though  it  imports  from  glaciated  Wisconsin. 


AUSTRALASIA   AND    REFRIGERATION 

The  refrigerator  ship  which  has  revolutionized  the  meat  supply 
has  also  made  possible  the  importation  of  butter  and  cheese  from 

the  most  remote  countries. 
Thus  New  Zealand,  on  the 
opposite  side  of  the  world 
from  Great  Britain,  has  be- 
come an  important  source 
of  supply.  That  country, 
nearly  as  largo  as  Italy,  has 
a  heavy  rainfall  owing  to 
the  prevalence  of  the  con- 
stant west  winds  from  the 
great  southern  seas.  The 
government  has  taken  great 
pains  to  inspect  and  guar- 
antee the  quality  of  exports, 
with  the  result  that  New 
Zealand  butter  and  cheese 
stand  well  in  European 
markets.  Between  1910  and 
1916,  the  number  of  cows 
in  New  Zealand  increased 
more  rapidly  than  the  num- 


FIG.  87. — Percentage  of  our  supply 
of  cold  storage  butter  on  hand  at 
the  beginning  of  the  various  months, 
1007-10  inclusive,  105,000,000  pounds 
on  hand  September  1,  1916.  (U.  S. 
Dept.  Agr.) 

ber  of  people,  and  produced 

one  million  tons  of  milk,  chiefly  used  in  the  making  of  butter 
and  cheese,  two-thirds  of  the  former  and  nine-tenths  of  the 
latter  being  exported.  For  the  year  ending  March  31,  1918, 
these  exports  were  valued  at  thirty -three  million  dollars.  At  that 
rate  per  capita  the  United  States  would  have  exported  over 
three  billion  dollars'  worth.  The  dairy  industry  of  Australia, 
which  is  farther  north  and  out  of  the  latitude  of  steady  rains, 
is  sadly  interfered  with  by  the  droughts.  Consequently  it  is  less 
important  there  than  in  New  Zealand,  being  almost  limited  to 
Victoria,  the  most  southerly,  the  coolest,  and  the  rainiest  part  of 


THE  INCREASE  OF  DAIRYING  265 

a  warm  dry  continent.  Nevertheless,  dairy  farming  is  increasing 
there  too,  and,  as  in  New  Zealand,  was  seriously  interfered  with 
during  1917  and  1918  by  the  ship  shortage. 


THE   ARGENTINE  REPUBLIC 

Argentina  shows  by  its  enormous  exports  of  cattle  and  beef  that 
it  might  also  furnish  milk  and  other  dairy  products  in  vast  quan- 
tity ;  but  thus  far  the  industry  has  made  but  a  small  beginning. 
There  are  several  reasons  for  this  condition:  it  takes  great  care 
to  make  good  butter  and  cheese  in  a  warm  climate ;  moreover,  the 
sparse  population  of  this  new  country  does  not  furnish  enough 
laborers  for  such  intensive  agriculture  as  dairying  demands;  and, 
furthermore,  the  laborers  of  Argentina  have  not  yet  developed 
skill  in  that  class  of  work. 

Dairying,  of  all  the  great  agricultural  industries,  is  the  most 
exacting  in  its  labor  requirements.  The  cows  must  be  milked 
morning  and  evening  the  year  round  or  at  least  for  many 
months;  they  must  be  treated  gently;  the  utensils  and  product 
must  be  kept  clean.  The  ability  to  do  all  this  has  been  developed 
chiefly  by  the  Teutonic  peoples  of  northern  Europe.  The  Spanish 
and  Italians  who  make  up  the  bulk  of  the  population  of  Argen- 
tina have  not  for  generations  been  trained  to  keep  cows;  but 
doubtless  they  can  create  a  new  source  of  dairy  products  in  the 
Southern  Hemisphere,  because  the  steadily  rising  price  indicates 
that  new  sources  of  supply  are  needed  and  Argentina  is  one  of 
several  countries  having  the  resources. 

POSSIBLE   EXTENSION   OF  DAIRY  AREAS  AND   DAIRY   INDUSTRY 

The  keeping  of  milk  products  without  ice  or  cold  spring  water 
is  so  difficult  that  people  in  most  warm  climates  were  virtually 
unable  to  make  good  butter  or  cheese  before  the  recent  improve- 
ments in  dairy  machinery  and  artificial  cooling.  Now  that  an 
engine,  windmill,  or  waterwheel  can  make  ice  and  a  cold  room 
anywhere,  the  tropics  or  the  cotton-belt  of  the  United  States  can, 
so  far  as  climate  is  concerned,  compete  on  an  equal  footing  with 
Wisconsin  or  Switzerland  in  this  respect.  It  requires  a  large 
number  of  cows,  two  to  five  hundred,  to  support  a  creamery  witb 


266  DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

cold-storage  attachment;  this  number  is,  however,  merely  the 
normal  number  for  a  modern  creamery.  The  way  is  now  open 
for  the  geographic  extension  of  dairying.  At  the  present  time 
it  is  an  industry  unnecessarily  restricted  to  the  cooler  parts  of 
the  world.  It  may  become  common  rather  than  exceptional  in 
the  warm  lands,  as  is  the  present  export  of  goat  butter  from  the 
green  island  of  Sokotra  across  the  straits  from  the  arid  mainland 
of  Arabia. 

The  world  may  have  ten  or  twenty  times  as  much  milk  as  it 
now  has,  without  any  serious  reduction  of  any  other  food  supply. 
This  apparent  contradiction  comes  from  the  fact  that  the  keeping 
of  cattle  is  almost  the  necessary  accompaniment  of  the  intensi- 
fication of  agriculture.  Their  manure  enriches  the  ground  so 
that  greater  quantities  of  other  commodities,  such  as  grain,  pota- 
toes, and  cotton,  can  be  grown.  There  would  be  little  difficulty 
in  doubling  the  wheat,  corn,  potato,  and  cotton  yield  of  most 
farms  in  the  United  States  if  the  farms  growing  these  crops 
should  also  become  dairy  farms,  as  is  easily  possible.  The  silo, 
the  engine  driven  separator,  and  churn,  and  the  refrigerator  in 
creamery,  car,  and  ship,  throw  open  to  the  dairy  industry  any 
part  of  the  world  which  can  support  cattle  in  any  numbers.  The 
fact  that  the  United  States  had  not  before  the  war  begun  to 
export  dairy  products,  while  Denmark,  Holland,  and  Switzer- 
land had,  indicates  that  this  great  country  has  not  begun  to 
develop  the  dairy  business,  except  as  a  local  industry.  Now  that 
nearly  all  of  the  cattle-raising  world  is  open  to  the  dairy  in- 
dustry, cheap  power  and  artificial  refrigeration  can  do  for  cheese, 
butter,  and  condensed  milk  what  the  reaper  and  thrasher  have 
done  for'wheat. 

The  milking  machine  is  a  factor  of  importance  in  the  milk 
resources  of  the  world.  The  same  engine  that  runs  the  sepa- 
rator can  run  the  air  pumps  that  operate  these  machines,  which 
from  careful  tests  are  found  to  be  as  good  for  the  cow  as  the  hand 
process,  and  much  faster,  though  requiring  a  higher  degree  of 
intelligence  and  care. 

In  our  corn-belt  instead  of  keeping  large  quantities  of  meat 
animals,  we  might  keep  as  large  or  larger  numbers  of  milk  ani- 
mals and  treble  the  food  production.  The  cotton-belt  of  the 
United  States  may,  without  much  exaggeration,  be  said  to  lie  idle 


POSSIBILITIES  ALMOST  UNLIMITED  267 

to  briars,  rabbits,  opossums,  and  shockingly  poor  crops  of  cotton 
and  corn  because  it  needs  an  animal  industry.*  It  is  to  be 
expected  that  the  first  stages  of  animal  industry  should  be  con- 
cerned with  meat  rather  than  milk;  but  the  inilk  resources  are 
there. 

The  wheat-belt,  from  Kansas  to  Alberta,  would  yield  more 
wheat  if  it  also  produced  butter  and  cheese.  The  productivity 
of  even  the  dry  lands  beyond  the  wheat-belt  would  be  improved, 
for  butter  and  cheese  are  admirable  products  for  a  far  frontier 
because  of  their  great  value  in  small  bulk,  which  makes  it  worth 
while  to  pay  the  freight  on  them.  Already  distant  lands  are  be- 
ginning to  ship  concentrated  dairy  products.  In  Minnesota  the 
dairy  industry  has  grown  most  rapidly  in  the  last  six  years,  and 
Alberta,  still  largely  unsettled,  already  has  nearly  as  many  cows 
per  capita  as  has  Ontario.  The  Imperial  Valley,  the  delta  at  the 
mouth  of  the  canyon  of  the  Colorado  River,  has  wonderful 
alfalfa  fields,  and  began  to  develop  the  dairy  industry  before 
the  region  was  fully  settled.  It  contained  sixteen  creameries 
producing  six  million  pounds  of  butter  in  1916.  As  this  region 
has  the  climate  of  Egypt,  its  experience  is  exceedingly  sug- 
gestive. 

Central  Siberia,  a  thousand  miles  beyond  the  Urals,  was  one  of 
the  world's  great  shippers  of  butter  until  the  year  1918.  Under 
the  Danish  leadership,  the  Russian  settlers  along  the  trans- 
Siberian  railroad  had  developed  a  great  butter  industry  in  lati- 
tude 55°  to  56°,  farther  north  than  the  upper  end  of  Lake 
Winnipeg,  and  far  above  Lake  Superior.  In  1916  there  were 
3,100  factories  in  the  Siberian  provinces  of  Tobolsk  and  Omsk. 
There  were  experimental  stations  for  the  development  of  tech- 
nical knowledge  of  the  subject.  Cheese-makers  had  been  sent 
from  Canada,  and  the  cheese  industry  was  making  good  head- 
way before  the  Great  War. 

If  the  world  desired,  the  Southern  Hemisphere,  now  devoted 
(save  New  Zealand)  so  exclusively  to  meat  and  wool,  might  also 
produce  large  quantities  of  dairy  products  for  export.  Since 

*  "  Fifteen  southern  states  imported  $600,000,000  worth  of  food  in  1916," 
says  Andrew  M.  Soule,  President  of  the  Georgia  State  Agricultural  College, 
in  a  hearing  before  a  committee  on  Agriculture  and  Forestry,  Part  V., 
Sixty-first  Congress,  first  session.  "  Eighty-five  million  dollars  of  it  went 
to  Georgia,  thirty  dollars'  worth  of  human  and  animal  food  per  capita." 


268  DAIRY  PRODUCTS 

the  cutting  off  of  the  European  supply  because  of  the  war,  dairy 
products  in  South  Africa  *  have  greatly  increased. 

Before  the  war  South  Africa  imported  much  butter.  In  1916 
she  exported  1,600,000  pounds;  in  1917,  3,000,000  pounds,  the 
product  of  co-operative  creameries. 

Improvements  of  the  breeds  of  dairy  cattle  f  and  the  quality 
of  the  average  cow  may  be  expected  easily  to  double,  treble,  and 
possibly  even  quadruple  the  output  of  a  given  number  of  cattle 
such  as  exist  today  on  many  dairy  farms.  A  few  years  ago  the 
average  cow  in  Pennsylvania  was  giving  3,900  pounds  of  milk 
per  year,  while  the  average  cow  in  Ayrshire,  Scotland,  was  giving 
6,600  pounds.  Yet  Ayrshire  is  by  nature  a  poorer  place  for  the 
dairy  industry  than  is  Pennsylvania.  The  only  difference  was 
that  the  farmers  of  Ayrshire  had  cow-testing  associations;  they 

*  "  Not  so  long  ago  the  cheese  exhibits  at  the  agricultural  show  were 
accommodated  on  a  small  table,  and  a  certain  large  Transvaal  firm  scrapped 
a  stock  of  cheese-making  apparatus,  imported  ten  years  ago,  as  unsalable. 
Today  the  South  African  cheese  is  candidly  admitted  by  experts  to  be  as 
good  as  the  imported  article.  Its  consumption  is  increasing  daily,  and 
the  local  manufacture  of  cheese  is  expanding  every  month.  For  a  while 
the  government  expert  has  been  touring  the  country  districts  with  his 
pail  and  his  press,  demonstrating  the  simplicity  of  the  method  of  manu- 
facture, and  pointing  out  that  whereas  one  gallon  of  milk  yields  one 
pound  of  cheese,  two  and  one-half  gallons  of  milk  are  required  to  yield 
one  pound  of  butter  fat.  Now,  so  far  from  the  old  story  of  the  consumer 
of  South  African  cheese  being  regarded  as  eccentric,  there  is  talk  of  a  big 
export  trade. 

"The  position  may  be  put  in  figures  roughly  as  follows:  In  1913  we 
imported  5,586,244  pounds.  In  1916  we  imported  only  2,028,508  pounds. 
In  February,  1913,  we  imported  432,289  pounds,  valued  at  £13,273;  in 
February,  1916,  123,790  pounds,  valued  at  £5,886;  and  in  February,  1917, 
8,310  pounds,  valued  at  £668.  These  figures  show  how  rapid  has  been 
the  decrease  in  imports  during  the  past  year,  and  the  rise  of  the  local 
manufacture  has  been  equally  rapid.  .  .  . 

"  It  is  told  of  the  wife  of  a  prominent  farmer  in  the  Free  State  that 
on  the  outbreak  of  war  she  drew  her  husband's  attention  to  the  fact  that 
so  much  milk  was  going  to  waste.  '  Buy  me  a  small  cheese  plant,'  she 
said,  'and  I  will  show  you  what  can  be  done  with  it!  '  Today  she  has 
increased  the  revenue  from  the  farm  by  £1,000  per  year"  (Commerce 
Report,  July  26,  1917.) 

t  The  problems  and  possibilities  of  cattle-breeding  are  well  shown  by 
the  work  of  William  Hohenzollern  in  one  of  his  many  attempts  to  make 
Germany  independent.  I  have  seen  hybrid  cattle  from  his  estates  pro- 
duced by  crossing  the  Indian  zebu  or  hump  cattle  with  Holstein  Frisian. 
The  Holstein  Frisian,  the  common  cow  of  Germany,  as  well  as  Holland, 
is  a  huge  beast,  very  susceptible  to  tuberculosis,  and  giving  large  quanti- 
ties of  milk,  low  in  butter  fat,  three  to  four  per  cent.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  Indian  zebu  is  proof  against  tuberculosis,  and  gives  milk  with  ten  to 
twelve  per  cent,  butter  fat.  W.  Hohenzollern  and  others  have  worked  for 
years  to  mingle  the  strains  of  these  two  breeds  in  such  a  way  as  to  get 
Holstein  size  and  quantity  of  milk,  and  Indian  vigor  and  richness  of  milk. 


DRIED  MILK  FROM  THE  ANTIPODES  269 

sent  the  poor  cows  to  the  shambles  and  kept  the  better  cows.  By 
this  same  process  the  cows  of  New  Zealand  improved  fourteen 
per  cent,  in  their  average  output  between  1910  and  1916.  There 
is  no  reason  why,  a  few  decades  hence,  the  cows  of  all  intelligent 
peoples  should  average  less  than  3,500  to  5,000  quarts  of  good 
milk  per  year.  See  the  record  of  the  Holstein  cow  given  on 
p.  245. 

On  the  whole,  the  prospective  supply  of  dairy  products,  outside 
of  the  Orient,  is  like  that  of  potatoes — capable  of  indefinite  in- 
crease, according  to  demand.  China  and  Japan  have,  however, 
reached  a  stage  of  intensity  of  agriculture  in  which  there  is  little 
room  for  the  cow.  Their  development  of  milk  substitute  is  one 
of  the  most  interesting,  suggestive,  and  stupendous  things  in  the 
world 's  food  situation. 

Dried  milk  is  a  substance  of  great  promise  for  the  world's 
milk  supply.  Its  perfect  fitness  for  transportation  enables  the 
ends  of  the  world  to  meet.*  In  1918  New  Zealand  became  en- 
thusiastic about  the  business ;  several  new  plants  were  built 
with  more  in  prospect. 

*  "  Milk  is  about  87.5  per  cent,  water.  It  is  produced  most  cheaply  at 
such  distances  from  the  best  markets  that  it  cannot  be  transported  to 
them.  It  is  difficult  to  keep  and  its  production  throughout  the  year  is 
not  uniform.  By  proper  drying  we  have  a  concentrated  food  that  can 
be  kept  without  ice,  is  bacUriologically  safe,  and  is  cheaper  than  the  cor- 
responding grade  of  fresh  milk.  For  many  reasons  dry  milk  is  actually 
superior  to  fresh  milk  in  the  kitchen." 

"  Regarding  dry  eggs  it  is  interesting  to  note  that  American  apparatus 
is  being  put  into  operation  in  China,  where  eggs  are  six  cents  a  dozen 
and  not  six  cents  each  as  with  us,  to  help  supply  our  needs.  It  takes 
51  yolks  to  make  a  pound  and  one  plant  has  a  capacity  of  2,000  pounds 
in  10  hours.  Fresh  eggs  dried  in  China  and  sent  here  will  make  a  far 
safer  and  better  omelet  than  many  of  our  cold  storage  eggs.  Years  ago 
experiments  with  eggs  dried  in  the  same  way  by  the  American  originator 
of  the  plan  were  very  successful  and  the  value  of  the  properly  prepared 
egg  powder  established." — Scientific  American,  July  20,  1918,  p.  52. 


CHAPTER  XII 
THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

SHEEP  and  goats  are  an  important  factor  in  the  local  meat  sup- 
ply of  many  countries,  and  also  in  the  meat  supply  of  the  world. 
Now  that  the  refrigerator  ship  pours  forth  its  truck-loads  of 
frozen  carcasses  at  far  ports,  according  to  local  demand,  sheep 
are  an  important  factor  in  commerce,  whether  they  are  chilled 
by  the  mists  and  snow  of  Terra  del  Fuego,  panting  with  the 
heat  of  Australian  droughts,  or  dodging  the  coyote  on  the  ranges 
of  Wyoming. 

Flocks  of  sheep  and  goats  are  scattered  over  all  the  conti- 
nents, wherever  is  found  a  certain  peculiar  combination  of 
geographic  environment,  industrial  environment,  and  social 
environment. 

It  is  generally  thought  that  our  ancestors  found  the  sheep  on 
the  mountains  of  central  Asia,  a  mottled  animal  of  black,  white, 
and  brown,  whose  pelt  has  made  us  the  best  of  all  protections 
against  the  cold  and  has  aided  our  advance  into  the  lands  of  frost 
and  snow,  and  whose  savory  flesh  had  been  prized  long  before 
it  was  prescribed  in  Hebrew  Law  as  an  offering  to  Deity.  Men 
speak  of  the  "golden  hoof"  or  the  "woolly  idiot,"  in  accord- 
ance with  their  recent  experiences  of  profit  in  commerce,  or  the 
exasperation  of  handling  a  difficult,  delicate,  and  stupid  animal, 
very  properly  called  an  idiot.  In  his  native  home  the  sheep  was 
probably  like  his  wild  cousins,  who  inhabit  the  most  inaccessible 
mountains  and  seek  their  safety  in  speedy  flight  up  the  almost 
impassable  rock  surfaces.  But  fenced  in,  where  escape  is  impos- 
sible, a  hundred  sheep  are  utterly  defenseless  against  the  attack 
of  even  one  small  dog,  which  can  kill  them  by  the  dozens  with- 
out their  making  any  attack  or  even  lifting  up  their  voices  in 
complaint  while  he  rends  them  one  by  one.  One  deer  would 
stamp  the  life  out  of  three  such  dogs  and  the  sheep  could  do  so 
if  he  tried. 

270 


SHEEP  AND  DROUGHT 


271 


272  THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

In  agriculture  the  sheep  occupies  two  positions:  (1)  he  is  very 
important  on  the  far  frontier  or  the  desert's  edge,  where  he  can 
crop  grass  and  yield  wool,  skins,  tallow,  bones,  or  meat,  one  or 
all,  according  to  market  conditions.  In  regions  of  diversified 
agriculture,  sheep  raising  occupies  a  position  midway  between 
the  extensive  cattle  raising  and  the  intensive  dairy  farming.  The 
yield  is  greater  than  that  of  beef,  because  of  the  rapid  growth 
of  the  lamb  and  the  rich  by-product  of  wool,  and  the  industry 
requires  much  more  care  because  the  animal  is  subject  to  dis- 
ease, is  an  easy  prey  to  accident  and  dogs,  and  on  account  of 
his  small  size  and  climbing  qualities  is  more  difficult  to  inclose 
with  a  fence.  On  the  other  hand,  sheep  raising  is  less  exacting 
than  dairy  farming. 

The  Old  Testament  shows  that  sheep  were  of  great  importance 
to  the  peoples  at  the  eastern  end  of  the  Mediterranean  Sea ;  they 
were  little  less  important  to  the  early  Greeks,  the  Komans,  and 
the  barbarians  who  overwhelmed  the  Koman  Empire. 

It  is  to  Britain,  however,  that  we  owe  most  of  our  breeds  of 
sheep.  English  pastures  are  among  the  best  in  the  world.  The 
country  has  been  less  disturbed  by  war  than  any  other  in  Europe, 
and  the  people,  being  lovers  of  good  mutton  and  manufacturers 
of  good  wool,  have  had  reason  to  grow  sheep,  of  which  there 
are  about  thirty  breeds,  falling  into  three  groups:  the  large, 
heavy  sheep  of  the  succulent,  lowland  pastures;  medium-sized 
sheep  of  the  rolling  hills;  small,  horned,  goat-like  sheep  of  the 
mountains  of  Scotland  and  Wales.  Other  parts  of  the  world 
show  even  more  strikingly  the  influence  of  environment  on 
sheep.  Many  desert  countries  have  sheep  that  are  really  the 
superiors  of  the  camel  in  their  ability  to  store  food  against  the 
time  of  shortage.  Instead  of  having  humps  on  their  backs,  as 
does  the  well-known  camel,  they  have  stores  of  fat  in  their  tails, 
which  member  sometimes  weighs  as  much  as  eighty  pounds. 
The  different  breeds  of  desert  sheep  have  different  shapes  and 
even  different  places  for  this  fat  accumulation.  In  some  cases 
the  tail  is  big  and  broad  like  a  sack,  and  in  others  it  is  long1 
and  narrow^  like  a  great  sausage.  Other  breeds,  especially  some 
of  the  Asiatic,  store  the  fat  in  various  places  and  shapes  on 
their  rumps.  It  is  said  that  in  some  parts  of  the  Kalahari  Desert 
of  South  Africa  the  sheep  tails  sometimes  get  so  large  that  the 


FAT-TAILED  SHEEP 


273 


owners  relieve  the  sheep's  burden  by  putting  a  pair  of  wheels 
under  his  tail.  I  have  not  seen  this,  as  I  have  never  visited  that 
country.  In  some  parts  of  the  dry  plains  of  central  Asia  the 
native  herdsman  host  honors  an  arriving  guest  by  sticking  into 
his  mouth  a  morsel  of  the  pure  fat  from  a  lamb's  tail,  which. 


Fio.  89. — Desert  edge  vegetation,  Tunis.  Rainfall  5  to  10  inches  per 
year.  Bare  ground  with  scattered  bushes  edible  for  sheep,  goats,  donkeys, 
and  camels.  This  flock  contains  goats  and  fat-tailed  desert  sheep  Photo- 
graph at  end  of  rainy  season ;  tails  show  great  accumulations  of  fat. 

etiquette  decrees  the  host  must  hold  in  his  own  fingers  and  the 
guest  must  take,  a  rather  high  price  for  travel. 

The  names  of  the  common  commercial  breeds  show  their  Brit- 
ish origin — as  Lincoln,  Dorset,  Southdowns,  Hampshiredowns, 
Oxforddowns,  Leicestershire,  and  Highland  sheep.  The  judges 
of  the  highest  English  courts  have  for  centuries  sat  upon  a 
cushion  of  wool  called  the  woolsack — a  symbol  of  the  early  com- 
mercial importance  of  wool.  The  best  breed  of  sheep  for  wool 
production,  however,  is  the  merino,  a  breed  developed  on  the 
high  plateau  of  Spain  from  sheep  whose  ancestors  originally 


274  THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

came  from  Africa.  The  necessity  of  making  annual  migra- 
tions from  the  dricd-up  pastures  of  the  Spanish  plains  to  the 
greener  pastures  of  the  mountains  has  made  the  merino  a 
good  traveler,  a  bony  little  beast  inferior  for  mutton,  but  very 
superior  for  fine  wool. 

FACTORS   AFFECTING   THE   DISTRIBUTION   OF  SHEEP   INDUSTRY 

Before  the  beginning  of  the  railway  epoch,  sheep  were  dis- 
tributed upon  the  farms  of  Europe  and  America,   and   most 


FIG  00 — By  artificial  selection  for  one  quality  some  strains  of  merino 
sheep  have  become  racks  for  wrinkly  skins,  and  every  wrinkle  covered 
with  fine  wool  until  the  sheep  is  almost  blinded  by  it. 

countries  were  much  more  nearly  self-supporting  with  regard  to 
supplies  of  wool  and  mutton  than  at  present.  Sheep  were  more 
numerous  in  the  United  States  in  proportion  to  people  and  to 
the  land  cultivated  in  1840  than  they  have  ever  been  since.  This 
condition  is  typical  of  many  countries.  The  period  of  world 
settlement  and  world  commerce  following  introduction  of  the  rail- 


A  SHEEP  REVOLUTION 


275 


way  and  the  steamship  about  1850  led  to  a  revolution  in  the 
sheep  and  wool  situation  of  the  world.  A  sheep  industry  on  the 
largest  scale  that  has  ever  been  or  is  ever  likely  to  be  seen  re- 
sulted from  the  throwing  open  of  large  areas  of  land,  which 


FIG  1)1. — Fine  specimens  of  British-bred  wool  sheep  with  fine  fat 
carcass,  and  smooth,  round  water-melon  form.  (H.  A.  MacDonald, 
Director  Colonization,  Toronto.) 

could  be  best  used  as  sheep  ranges,  in  North  and  South  America, 
Africa,  Australia,  and  central  Asia. 

Probably  because  of  his  mountain  and  desert  origin,  the  sheep 
is  a  good  climber  for  rough  pastures,  and  a  good  traveler.  He 
can  go  far  for  his  food  and  water  or  to  market.  His  sharp  nose 
enables  him  to  reach  into  the  crannies  of  rocks  for  scanty  herb- 
age. Altogether  he  is  well  fitted  for  the  utilization  of  land  not 
fit  for  the  plow,  and  regions  most  dependent  on  sheep  arc  those 
parts  of  the  earth's  surface  which  for  some  reason  are  not  avail- 
able for  cultivation.  It  may  be  that  the  land  is  too  rough  or  too 
wet,  as  in  the  Scotch  Highlands  with  their  heavy  rains.  These 
hills  would  naturally  be  covered  with  luxuriant  forests,  but  are 


276  THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

entirely  barren  of  trees  because  for  centuries  sheep  ranged  the 
forests  and  ate  every  young  tree  that  came  up,  until  finally 
when  the  old  trees  died,  the  land  was  left  for  grass  and  heather 
on  which  the  sheep  flocks  have  in  some  cases  subsisted  for  several 
centuries.  Similarly,  certain  hills  in  the  south  of  England  bear 
to  this  day  the  names  of  forests,  although  for  many  generations 
they  have  been  treeless  pasture  lands  devoted  to  flocks  of  sheep. 
Thus,  Cotswold  (meaning  wood)  Hills  gave  their  name  to  a 
breed  of  sheep  which  long  ago  killed  the  trees  of  this  wood. 

Semi-aridity,  however,  is  the  greatest  reason  why  land  is 
devoted  to  the  pasturage  of  sheep  rather  than  to  cultivation  in 
grain  and  other  crops. 

For  instance,  the  plateaus  of  dry  Spain  have  been  famous 
for  their  sheep  since  the  times  of  Hannibal  and  of  Caesar.  The 
greatest  flocks  in  the  world  are  on  the  semi-arid  plains  of  Aus- 
tralia, Argentina,  and  western  United  States ;  the  fact  that  some 
of  these  lands  are  hot,  and  not  naturally  suited  to  sheep,  fur- 
nishes another  example  of  an  industry  which  flourishes  in  an 
unsuitable  place.  The  sheep  with  his  warm  coat  is  equipped 
for  cold  climates;  the  fleece  degenerates  in  hot  lands,  and  the 
wool  entirely  disappears  in  Cuba,  Brazil,  and  central  Africa, 
leaving  only  the  hair  coat  of  which  all  sheep  possess  a  little. 
In  Australia,  the  tendency  to  degeneration  because  of  heat  has 
been  overcome  by  the  constant  importation  of  fresh  breeding 
stock  from  England,  Vermont,  and  other  localities  where  the 
sheep  is  at  his  best. 

NUMBERS  OF  SHEEP  (1913). 
(From  Tear  Book  of  Agriculture,  1913). 

Semi-arid  countries:  Millions 

Australia    83.2 

British  South  Africa 30.6 

Algeria   8.5 

Spain  15.8 

Italy    11.1 

Greece   4.0 

Turkey   21.1 

Asiatic  Turkey   45. 

Asiatic  Russia 32.3 

Chile   4.1 

Mexico 3.4 


SHEEP  AND  AGRICULTURE  277 

Countries  partly  semi-arid: 

United  States 50.1 

Argentina    80.4 

Russia    48.1 

Countries  of  scanty  population,  good  rainfall  and 
remote  from  markets: 

Uruguay    26.2 

New  Zealand 23.9 

Countries  with  highly  developed  agriculture: 

France    16.4 

Germany 5.8 

United  Kingdom  27.8 

Belgium    .2 

Denmark    .7 

Switzerland    .2 


Total  of  the  world 538.9 

VALUE  OF  SHEEP  TO  REGIONS  REMOTE  FROM   MARKETS 

A  third  reason  why  land  may  be  devoted  only  to  sheep  is  its 
inaccessibility  to  markets  for  the  heavy  and  less  valuable  prod- 
ucts of  agriculture,  whose  cost  of  transportation  must  be  rela- 
tively high.  Grain  requires  a  railroad  close  at  hand.  Cattle, 
unless  their  meat  can  be  marketed,  have  nothing  to  yield  but 
the  hide  and  tallow,  which  is  of  less  value  than  the  fleeces,  skins, 
and  tallow  of  sheep.  Consequently,  sheep  give  the  people  of 
remote  plains  the  greatest  possible  cash  income,  and  the  opening 
of  new  lands  between  1850  and  1890  caused  an  enormous  in- 
crease in  the  number  of  sheep  throughout  the  whole  world. 

The  Falkland  Islands  afford  an  excellent  illustration  of  the 
commercial  service  of  sheep  to  the  people  of  a  remote  land. 
This  group  of-  islands,  more  than  half  as  large  as  Maryland, 
is  located  in  the  South  Atlantic  Ocean  opposite  Cape  Horn,  in 
a  latitude  corresponding  to  southern  Alaska  and  Scotland.  The 
rainfall  of  the  islands  is  heavy ;  but  the  climate  is  cool,  and  there 
is  no  tillage,  because  the  prevailing  westerly  winds  of  that  lati- 
tude blow  so  hard  that  even  trees  are  blown  out  of  the  ground. 
Yet  these  windy  plains  and  hills  produce  good  grass,  and  each 
of  the  2,200  inhabitants  who  give  Falkland  a  population  of  one- 
third  of  a  person  per  square  mile,  owns,  on  the  average,  one 
horse,  two  cattle,  and  300  sheep.  The  non-perishable  wool,  skins, 


278 


THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 


and  tallow  of  the  sheep,  comprising  practically  the  entire  export 
of  the  islands,  enable  the  people  to  command  the  goods  of  all 
the  world,  to  become  well  educated,  and  to  receive  more  mail 
per  capita  than  the  people  of  any  other  land.  It  requires  a  very 
small  population  to  utilize  the  land  in  this  way,  and  as  a  result 


< 
Ohio 

United  States 
Uruguay 
United  Kingdom 

Sheep  i 
9     3    g 

CT 

>er  Square  Mile.  1913 

o   £ 
e 
f~ 

1 

Sheep  per  1,000  Population.  1913 

5     ed^cfoZ'oao'-H'-iri^ci 
-*     -*      ~«     c*i     <M     ce     co 

J 

- 

• 

• 

1 

France 

sam 

• 

1 

Spain 

mm 

• 

1 

Turkey 

m 

• 

Argentina 

mm 

• 

• 

Union  S.Africa 
Australia 
European  Russia 

mm 
• 
• 

• 

• 

• 

1 

British  India 

• 

1 

Asiatic  Russia 

1 

HE 

1 

Germany 
Wyoming 
New  York 

• 
• 

1 

' 

FIG.  92  — Sheep  per  square  mile  and  per  one  thousand  inhabitants 
before  the  Great  War.  Interesting  comparisons  on  the  relative  impor- 
tance of  sheep. 


the  people  are  so  scattered  upon  their  large  sheep  ranches  that 
the  public  schoolmasters  must  travel  from,  ranch  to  ranch  to 
teach  the  children  in  their  homes.  The  surplus  population  from 
this  region  is  migrating  to  the  nearby  coasts  of  Patagonia  and 
there  spreading  the  sheep  industry.  The  Islands  of  Faroe  and 
Iceland,  in  northern  latitudes  corresponding  to  that  of  Falkland, 
also  depend  greatly  on  the  export  of  sheep  products. 


THE  MODERN  SHEPHERD  279 

IMPORTANCE  OF  SHEEP  IN  SOUTH  TEMPERATE  ZONE 

The  south  temperate  zone,  with  its  large  plains  in  South  Amer- 
ica, South  Africa,  Australia,  and  New  Zealand,  is  the  part  of 
the  world  most  dependent  on  sheep.  This  zone,  with  less  than 
one  and  one-half  per  cent,  of  the  world's  population,  owns  about 
forty  per  cent,  of  the  world's  sheep.  For  the  whole  world,  there 
is  about  one  sheep  to  two  and  two-thirds  persons,  but  in  the 
south  temperate  zone,  which  combines  the  qualities  of  remoteness, 
semi-aridity,  and  sparse  population,  there  are  ten  sheep  per 
person. 

On  the  plains  of  these  countries,  as  on  other  great  sheep 
ranches,  there  is  a  special  method  of  caring  for  the  sheep.  These 
stupid  and  defenseless  animals  require  constant  care,  and  can- 
not be  allowed  to  shift  for  themselves  like  cattle.  In  all  regions 
of  large  sheep  production  the  method  of  care  is  much  the  same. 
The  herder  with  a  couple  of  dogs  takes  a  flock  of  two  or  three 
thousand  sheep  and  follows  them  for  days  and  weeks,  being 
met  at  appointed  places  by  supply  wagons  sent  out  by  his  em- 
ployer. The  speedy  sheep  dogs,*  with  the  qualities  inherited  for 
many  generations,  are  much  more  skilful  helpers  than  men  in 
driving  the  animals,  and  the  herder's  rifle  protects  from  wolves, 
foxes,  and  wild  dogs,  while  the  flocks  are  commonly  put  into 
corrals  or  fenced  inclosures  at  night. 

Australia  has  long  been  known  as  the  greatest  of  sheep  coun- 
tries, the  leader  of  wool  exporters,  and  is  now  a  great  mutton 
exporter.  That  continent,  which  is  about  as  large  as  the  United 
States,  has  a  mountain  barrier  parallel  to  the  eastern  coast  which 
shuts  off  from  the  interior  most  of  the  rain  brought  by  the 
southeast  trade-winds.  The  narrow  plain  along  the  coast  ib 
good  for  corn  and  other  agricultural  crops  requiring  moisture, 
and  there  are  almost  no  sheep  (see  Fig.  88  on  page  271  and  Fig. 
93  on  page  280),  but  west  of  the  mountains  the  wide  expanses  of 
plain  that  slope  gently  away  from  the  sea  have  too  little  rainfall 
for  the  cultivation  of  crops,  though  enough  to  produce  good  grass. 
Some  of  the  finest  sheep  ranges  in  the  world  lie  between  these 

*  Nearly  every  sheep  country  has  its  own  hre«-d  of  sheep  dogs,  each  of 
which  is  "  the  best  in  the  world."  In  this  respect  they  resemble  every- 
body's doe. 


280 


mountains  and  the  grassless  desert  which  occupies  the  central  and 
western  part  of  the  continent.  The  desert  may  be  said  to  begin  at 
the  line  of  ten  inches  of  rainfall — a  climatic  barrier  beyond  which 
the  pasture  is  scarce  worth  the  walking.  The  railroads  that  con- 
nect the  ranches  with  the  eastern  ports  reach  almost  to  the  desert 
and  ail  the  land  that  has  any  value  has  for  some  decades  been  oc- 


Fio.  93. — The  enormous  numbers  01  sheep  in  a  small  area  of  good  rain- 
fall show  what  Australia  missed  by  her  aridity,  (Finch  and  Baker.) 
See  Fig.  88. 

cupied  by  the  sheep  flocks.  Australia  is  unfortunate  in  the  arid 
nature  of  much  of  her  territory  and  also  in  the  irregularity  of 
such  rainfall  as  she  does  get.  Droughts  sometimes  last  for  long 
periods,  cutting  off  both  grass  and  water  so  that  the  poor  sheep 
perish  by  millions,  as  in  the  period  from  1894  to  1898,  when 
continued  drought  reduced  the  sheep  flocks  from  110  million 
to  eighty-four  million.  During  the  next  four  years  25,000,000 
more  sheep  perished,  bringing  the  flock  of  1902  down  to  nearly 
one-half  that  of  1894.  During  the  same  period,  1898-1902,  the 


SHEEP  AND  RAINFALL  281 

number  of  cattle  was  reduced  one-third.  The  great  dependence 
of  the  flocks  upon  rainfall  is  shown  by  the  observations  of  a 
scientist  who  says  that  with  ten  inches  of  rainfall  per  year  an 
Australian  plain  will  support  ten  sheep  per  square  mile;  with 
thirteen  inches  of  rain,  twenty  sheep,  and  with  twenty  inches 
of  rain,  seventy  sheep. 

New  South  Wales  contains  jnore  than  half  the  sheep  of  Aus- 
tralia, while  Queensland,  farther  north  (nearer  the  torrid  zone), 
has  more  rain  and  heat  and  better  forage,  and,  therefore,  a  pre- 
dominance of  cattle  over  sheep,  since  they  can  stand  heat  with 
moisture  better  than  sheep,  and  also  require  better  pasture. 
South  of  New  South  Wales  is  Victoria,  which  lies  far  enough 
from  the  equator  to  be  in  the  region  of  prevailing  westerly 
winds  and  gets  more  rain  that  New  South  Wales;  it  has  better 
pastures,  but  only  one-quarter  as  many  sheep.  Because  of  the 
superiority  of  the  Victorian  pasture  in  a  cool  climate  the  farmers 
have  enough  grass  to  keep  cows  and  make  butter,  of  which  much 
more  is  exported  than  is  exported  from  the  United  States.  (See 
Table  of  Dairy  Products.)  The  market  for  the  butter,  as  for 
the  frozen  beef  of  Queensland  and  frozen  mutton  of  New  South 
Wales,  and  New  Zealand,  and  the  wool  of  all  lies  almost  entirely 
in  the  mother  country,  Great  Britain. 

New  Zealand,  farther  south  than  Australia,  with  the  good 
rainfall  from  the  prevailing  westerly  winds,  is  an  excellent  sheep 
country,  and  is  largely  given  over  to  that  industry. 

Some  of  the  mountain  pastures  on  the  western  coast  of  New 
Zealand,  very  wet  from  exposure  to  the  sea  winds,  have  such 
plentiful  grass  that  they  will  support  five  sheep  per  acre  through- 
out the  year.  Owing  to  the  sparse  population — less  than  a  mil- 
lion people  in  a  good  grazing  territory  as  large  as  New  York, 
New  Jersey,  and  Pennsylvania  combined — agriculture  cannot  be 
very  much  developed  and  the  twenty-three  million  sheep  and 
two  million  cattle  are  the  chief  wealth  of  the  country.  There 
are  5,000  ranches  of  over  1,000  acres  each;  the  newness  of  the 
country  is  shown  by  the  fact  that  between  the  years  1891  and 
1901  the  occupied  land  increased  from  twenty  to  twenty-seven 
million  acres,  and  the  latter  figure  is  less  than  half  the  total 
area.  The  good  pasture  and  regular  food  supply  of  New  Zea- 
land causes  the  frozen  mutton  of  that  country  to  be  considered 


282 


THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 


the  best  imported  into  England.  The  sheep  are  often  fattened 
by  being  turned  into  large  fields  of  turnips,  from  which  they 
first  eat  the  tops  and  then  the  entire  root.  It  is  said  that  mutton 
could  be  produced  at  a  cost  of  three  cents  a  pound  before  the 
war. 

The  sheep  district  that  most  closely  resembles  Australia  in 
character  and  rivals  it  in  importance  is  the  Parana  (the  English 

call  it  Plate)  Valley  of  South 
America,  comprising  the  most 
of  Argentina  and  the  little, 
but  good,  country  of  Uruguay. 
Here,  as  in  interior  Australia 
and  in  central  North  America, 
is  a  level  plain  of  vast  ex- 
tent. For  hundreds  of  miles 
it  seems  as  level  as  the  sea. 
One  railroad  runs  westward 
toward  the  Andes  on  a  per- 
fectly straight  line  for  278 
miles,  a  distance  greater  than 
that  from  New  York  to 
Washington,  or  from  London 
to  Edinburgh.  Near  the 
Parana  River,  the  rainfall  is 
sufficient  for  the  growth  of 
corn,  wheat,  flax,  and  alfalfa, 
but  as  the  distance  from  the 
river  increases,  the  rainfall 
decreases,  and  as  in  the  re- 


SHEEP 
NUMBER 

EACH  DOT  REPRESENTS  10,000 


FIG.  94. — Southern  South  America 
with  some  fine  grass  land  and  much 
that  is  too  dry,  shares,  to  a  less 
extent,  the  handicap  of  Australia. 
(Finch  and  Baker.)  See  Fig.  93. 


gion  beyond  the  Missouri 
River,  a  corn-belt  is  followed 
by  a  wheat-belt,  and  the  zone 
of  farm  lands  is  succeeded 
by  a  zone  of  ranch  lands 
in  which  the  industrial  future  must,  like  the  present  and  the 
past,  be  devoted  to  roving  flocks.  Forty  or  fifty  years  ago, 
when  there  was  a  great  demand  for  haircloth,  herds  of  horses 
valued  at  $2.50  each  were  driven  into  pens  twice  a  year  by  their 
owners  to  have  their  manes  and  tails  clipped  to  furnish  horse- 


THE  SOUTHERN  HEMISPHERE  283 

hair  for  the  crinoline  looms  in  England  and  France.  Then  came 
the  merino  sheep,  whose  wool  and  tallow,  skin  and  bone  also, 
went  to  Europe,  while  his  meat  was  thrown  away  because  there 
was  no  possible  market  for  it.  Sometimes  the  sheep  were  even 
killed  because  it  was  easier  to  pluck  the  dead  than  shear  the  liv- 
ing. Then  came  the  refrigerator  ship  and  the  export  of  mutton. 
The  pastures  of  the  Parana  Valley  are  so  fine  that  the  sheep  fat- 
ten entirely  on  grass,  which  is  uncommon.  The  moister  eastern 
section,  with  its  corn  and  alfalfa  lands,  is  devoted  to  cattle 
raising,  pushing  the  sheep  westward. 

It  is  interesting  that  the  present  vast  sheep  flocks  of  Argentina 
are  very  largely  owned  and  cared  for  by  English  and  Scotch 
people,  who  for  many  generations  in  their  own  countries  have 
been  thoroughly  acquainted  with  sheep  and  know  their  ills,  their 
wants  and  their  ways,  and  are  reliable  enough  to  care  for  them. 
The  cattle,  requiring  less  care,  are  usually  owned  by  the  people 
of  Spanish  descent  and  cared  for  by  the  rough  and  boisterous 
guacho  or  half-breed  Indian-Spanish  cowboy  of  that  country. 

In  northern  Argentina,  the  greater  heat  and  rainfall  make 
cattle  more  important  than  sheep,  and  toward  the  cold  south 
the  plains  of  Patagonia,  a  little  known  region,  are  being  rapidly 
taken  up  as  sheep  ranges  by  the  Falkland  Islanders.  Sheep  farms 
have  been  established  in  most  of  Patagonia  as  well  as  on  the  far- 
away island  of  Terra  del  Fuego,  at  the  extreme  end  of  South 
America,  the  sheep  being  better  able  than  cattle  to  live  in  this 
country,  since  their  wool  protects  them  from  the  severity  of 
the  winter;  they  will  also  scratch  away  the  snow  to  get  at  the 
grass  that  lies  beneath  it,  and,  if  necessary,  they  can  fast  for 
several  days  when  the  snow  lies  deep. 

The  island  of  Terra  del  Fuego,  with  its  heavy  grass,  cool  cli- 
mate, plenty  of  rain  and  freedom  from  disease,  is  one  of  the 
best  sheep-raising  regions  in  the  world. 

Uruguay,  across  the  Parana  River  from  the  best  part  of 
Argentina,  is  from  end  to  end  an  undulating  grassy  plain. 
There  are  a  few  grain  growers  near  Montevideo,  the  capital, 
but  in  times  of  peace  twenty-five  times  as  much  land  is  devoted 
to  sheep  and  cattle  pastures.  The  number  of  sheep  doubled 
between  1880  and  1900  and  their  products  make  up  the  great 
bulk  of  the  exports  of  the  country. 


284! 


THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 


SOUTH   AFRICA 

South  Africa  is  a  dry  land  of  flocks  and  herds.  Like  Aus- 
tralia, this  region  has  mountains  near  the  ocean  which  shut 
off  the  southeast  trade  winds  from  the  interior,  leaving  a  moist 
plain  near  the  sea  for  agriculture  and  cattle  raising.  Back  of 
the  mountains  is  a  wide  expanse  of  interior,  too  dry  for  the 
plow,  where  the  climate  and  the  pasture  conditions  are  suited 
to  sheep  and  goats,  save  where  they  are  too  dry  for  pasturage, 
as  in  the  Kalahari  Desert,  which  corresponds  to  the  central  desert 
of  Australia. 

WESTERN    UNITED   STATES 

The  plains  of  the  United  States  have  not  been  at  any  time 
so  exclusively  devoted  to  sheep  raising  as  have  similar  parts  of 


TED  STATES 
SHEEP 

(EXCLUSIVE  OF  LAMB* 

NUMBER 
EACH  DOT  REPRESENT! 


Fro.  95. — The  United  States,  with  corn,  hogs,  cattle,  dairying  and 
nearby  markets,  has  no  such  concentrations  of  sheep  as  have  Australia 
and  Argentina.  The  nearest  approach  is  on  the  hills  of  the  upper  Ohio 
Valley.  (Finch  and  Baker.) 

Australia  and  Argentina,  because  the  vigorous  and  hostile  In- 
dians held  the  American  plains  against  the  advance  of  the  white 
man  until  the  railroads  came.  Then  cattle  could  be  sent  to 
market,  and  the  sheep  growing  and  wool  exporting  so  common 


FIGHTING  FOR  GRASS  285 

in  the  Southern  Hemisphere  became  less  necessary.  The  first 
industry  of  our  West  was  the  rounding  up  of  cattle  on  the 
plains  by  the  cowboy.  Sheep  herding,  which  came  later,  has  had 
large  development,  especially  in  Montana,  Wyoming,  New  Mex- 
ico, Utah,  and  Oregon.  Most  of  the  American  sheep  are  in  regions 
with  rainfall  of  from  ten  to  fifteen  inches,  where  much  of  the 
land  still  belongs  to  the  government,  an  open,  unfenced  range, 
whose  grass  belongs  to  any  beast  that  eats  it.  The  sheep  eat 
it  more  closely  than  do  cattle,  leaving  nothing  behind  them  for 
the  cattle,  and  often  destroying  the  grass  itself  by  pulling  it  up  by 
the  roots.  A  bitter  animosity  between  the  sheep-owners  and 
cattle-owners  has  resulted,  sometimes  leading  to  fights  involving 
loss  of  human  life  and  the  destruction  of  hundreds  of  sheep  and 
cattle  by  shooting  or  driving  over  cliffs. 

Half  the  sheep  of  the  United  States  are  in  the  Rocky  Moun- 
tain states,  where  they  graze  the  mountain  pastures  in  the  sum- 
mer, and  winter  in  the  lower  valleys,  or  on  the  desert  plains 
that  can  be  pastured  at  no  other  season.  Large  numbers  of 
sheep  get  summer  pasture  in  the  national  forests  under  careful 
supervision  of  the  Forest  Service. 

WOOL   SHEEP,    MUTTON   SHEEP,   AND   REFRIGERATION 

In  the  newer  quarters  of  the  world,  the  earliest  object  of 
keeping  sheep  was  the  production  and  sale  of  fine  wool,  a  pur- 
pose for  which  the  merino  is  the  best  breed  of  sheep.  By  care- 
ful breeding  and  selection  through  many  centuries,  it  has  been 
developed  into  a  little  bony  animal,  with  a  wrinkly  skin,  thereby 
furnishing  for  a  minimum  of  food  a  maximum  of  surface  cov- 
ered with  a  long,  fine  fleece  which  has  at  times  been  known  to 
comprise,  with  the  grease,  thirty-six  per  cent,  of  the  weight  of 
the  entire  animal  and  to  have  48,000  strands  per  square  inch  of 
skin. 

In  the  decade  between  1880  and  1890,  the  perfection  of  cold 
storage  and  refrigeration  suddenly  caused  a  demand  for  mutton 
at  Buenos  Ayres,  at  Wellington,  New  Zealand,  at  Melbourne  and 
Sydney,  Australia,  as  well  as  at  Chicago,  Kansas  City,  and 
Omaha.  The  rising  price  of  meat  since  1900  has  emphasized 
that  demand  and  made  the  carcass  more  valuable  by  far  than 


286  THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

the  fleece.  The  merino  sheep,  with  his  excellent  fleece,  long  mas- 
ter of  the  far-found  pasture,  has  a  lean  carcass,  while  the  mutton- 
loving  English  had  carefully  bred  and  selected  the  Lincolnshire 
and  the  Southdown  and  other  breeds  for  the  ability  to  grow 
large  and  fat  and  make  fine  mutton,  regardless  of  their  coarse 
and  meager  wool.  In  Argentina,  Montana,  and  Australia  the 
refrigerator  ship  suddenly  made  the  big,  fat  sheep  more  valua- 
ble than  the  little  merino  with  its  fine  fleece.  As  a  result,  many 
sheep  breeders  at  once  began  cross-breeding  their  flocks  for  mut- 
ton rather  than  wool,  and  in  a  little  while  the  sheep  were  half- 
Lincolnshire,  then  three-quarters,  and  often  seven-eighths.  As  a 
result,  the  people  of  Europe  can  now  eat  antipodean  mutton ; 
but  the  wool  market  has  been  disturbed  by  the  increased  abun- 
dance of  coarse  wool  and  the  scarcity  of  fine  wool.  In  New 
Zealand  and  Argentina  the  sheep  have  changed  more  rapidly 
than  in  Australia,  because  in  the  latter  country  the  droughts 
often  make  it  impossible  to  fatten  sheep  for  market,  so  that 
breeders  have  continued  to  raise  sheep  for  wool,  and  have  kept 
more  merino  blood  in  their  flocks. 


SHEEP    UPON    THE    FARMS    OF    EASTERN    UNITED    STATES 

On  the  farms  of  the  eastern  United  States  and  Europe,  which 
were  the  sole  sheep  regions  before  1850,  sheep  arc  still  kept; 
but  they  are  in  small  flocks  grazing  in  fenced  fields,  and  are 
declining  in  number.  When  the  remote  regions  began  to  produce 
fine  wool  there  was  an  added  reason  for  the  farmers  to  devote 
their  attention  to  the  mutton  breeds.  In  the  United  States  these 
sheep  are,  like  the  cattle,  usually  migrants.  The  full-grown -ewe 
is  brought  from  some  place  in  the  range  country  to  Kansas 
City,  Omaha,  or  Chicago,  and  then  sent  to  the  farms  of  Wis- 
consin, Michigan,  and  Eastern  States,  where  the  farmers  keep 
them  for  several  years.  Each  year  a  crop  of  lambs  is  sold  and 
finally  the  fat  old  ewes  are  sent  to  market  and  another  supply 
purchased  from  the  distant  regions,  where  the  young  sheep,  like 
the  young  cattle,  can  be  raised  to  maturity  more  cheaply  than 
upon  the  small  farms.  These  small  flocks  that  can  receive  the 
personal  care  of  their  owners  fare  much  better  and  produce  a 
larger  proportion  of  lambs  than  can  be  raised  in  the  large  flocks 


THE  MIGRANT  SHEEP  287 

upon  the  range,  where  less  attention  can  be  given  them.  Many 
of  the  Eastern  sheep-owners  make  a  specialty  of  rearing  their 
lambs  in  the  winter  season  and  sending  them  to  market  early 
in  the  year  when  they  command  a  very  high  price. 

There  is  a  rather  large  area  in  the  southern  Appalachian  high- 
lands of  Tennessee,  Virginia,  and  West  Virginia  where  ewes  are 


FIG.  96. — Forage  beets  in  a  New  England  field.  Much  stock  food  and 
much  labor  per  acre.  The  silage  substitute  of  East  Canada  and  Europe. 
Characteristic  New  England  upland  landscape  in  the  background.  (U.  S. 
Dept.  Agr.) 

grown  and  sold  to  the  farmers  of  the  Great  Valley  and  the 
Piedmont  sections  of  Virginia,  Maryland,  and  also  lower 
Pennsylvania. 

New  England,  with  its  rocky  and  little-used  farms,  offers  one 
of  the  best,  but  not  extensive,  places  in  the  United  States  for 
the  increase  of  sheep  growing.  The  rocky  lands  produce  grass ; 
and  there  might  be  worked  out  a  combination  of  hill  pasture 
and  valley-grown  winter  forage  such  as  exists  in  the  arid  West, 
with  its  irrigated  valleys. 

At  the  present  time  rather  more  than  a  third  of  the  sheep 
in  the  United  States  are  east  of  the  Mississippi  River.  It  is  a 


288  THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

common  practice  of  some  corn-belt  farmers  from  southern  Michi- 
gan to  central  Nebraska  to  buy  carloads  of  lean  lambs  from 
the  western  range  in  the  autumn,  and  fatten  them  on  corn  and 
hay  for  the  winter  market. 

The  farms  of  the  United  States  might  easily  produce  many 
million  more  sheep  without  any  material  reduction  in  any  other 
output,  because  much  of  the  country  is  admirably  suited  to  the 
sheep.  The  reason  why  they  are  not  grown  is  man's  affection 
for  the  sheep's  deadly  enemy,  the  dog.  Go  down  the  road  any- 
where in  the  grass  country,  from  Maine  to  Tennessee,  and  ask 
the  farmers  if  they  ever  kept  sheep.  Most  of  them  will  tell  you 
they  have,  and  when  asked  if  they  keep  sheep  now,  most  of 
them  will  answer,  "No."  When  asked  why,  they  say,  "Dogs." 
Nearly  all  farmers  try  sheep  once ;  and  in  a  year  or  two,  some- 
times in  a  day  or  two,  their  flocks  are  attacked  by  dogs,  several 
sheep  killed,  others  maimed,  and  the  whole  flock  put  into  a  con- 
dition of  nervous  excitement  in  which  they  will  not  thrive.  The 
Food  Administration  of  the  United  States  says: 

There  is,  however,  the  general  fact  to  consider  that  through  the 
Middle,  Southern,  and  Eastern  States  anywhere  from-  3  to  20  sheep 
could  be  added  to  almost  every  160-acre  farm.  They  would  feed  upon 
material  that  would  otherwise  go  to  waste,  and  in  the  aggregate  would 
furnish  the  United  States  with  the  greatest  flock  of  sheep  in  the  world.* 

We  shall  have  to  choose  either  (1)  mutton  and  wool,  or  (2) 
cur  dogs,  who  are  probably  reducing  our  sheep  flock  by  twenty 
million  and  making  the  nation  several  hundred  million  dollars  a 
year  poorer  than  it  otherwise  would  be.  At  present  we  choose 
the  cur. 

SHEEP  IN  WESTERN  EUROPE 

The  great  increase  of  sheep  in  the  Southern  Hemisphere,  to- 
gether with  local  causes,  has  produced  a  general  decline  of  sheep 
raising  in  Europe,  especially  in  the  densely  peopled  regions  where 
the  climate  is  good  for  agriculture.  Throughout  western  Europe 
the  sheep  industry  resembles  that  of  the  eastern  United  States, 
and  lambs  and  mutton  are  of  more  value  than  wool.  The  Ger- 

*  Grain  and  Live  Stock,  Bulletin  No.  10,  p.  14. 


EUROPEAN  SHEEP  FLOCKS 


289 


man  flocks   declined  from  twenty-five  million  in   1873  to  six 
million  in  1912,  as  population  and  the  demand  for  grain  and 


FIG.  97. — The  value  of  sheep  in  humid  Britain,  semi-arid  North 
Africa,  and  the  rough  and  semi-arid  Balkans,  is  apparent.  (Finch  and 
Baker.) 

milk  increased.  The  field  in  grain  will  produce  more  food  than 
in  sheep  pasture,  so  that  the  grain  field,  the  garden,  the  dairy 
farm,  and  the  sugar  field  have  taken  the  place  of  the  sheep 
pasture  in  Germany,  as  the  valuable  wool  and  meat  can  be 


COUNTRIES 

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FIG.  98. — Comparisons  of  sheep  industry  in  some  European  countries. 
(Finch  and  Baker.) 

imported  more  easily  than  the  cheaper  and  bulkier  food  prod- 
ucts. In  France  also  the  grain  fields  have  replaced  some  of  the 
sheep  pastures.  Some  fine  mutton  sheep,  however,  continue  to 
be  produced  in  the  most  intensely  cultivated  parts  of  Europe, 
.as  in  Belgium,  Holland,  and  Germany,  usually  in  the  poorer, 


290  THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

more  scantily  populated  parts  of  these  countries.  The  Euro- 
pean sheep  are  fed  much  on  barley  and  rape,  a  succulent  cab- 
bage-like plant  that  grows  in  sandy  soil. 

Down  to  the  outbreak  of  the  war  there  had  been  less  change 
in  the  sheep  industry  of  Great  Britain  than  in  any  other  coun- 
try of  western  Europe.  The  English  began  early  to  keep  sheep , 
they  prize  mutton,  and  especially  British  mutton ;  their  moist 
climate  gives  abundant  grass,  and  their  policy  of  free  trade 
makes  easy  the  importation  of  grain,  so  that  it  was  cultivated 
much  less  than  in  France  or  Germany;  its  place  was  taken  by 
sheep  and  cattle.  The  war  has  reduced  the  flocks  of  England, 
as  of  all  other  European  countries,  and  the  pastures  have  been 
converted  into  fields  of  grain.  The  chief  British  sheep  districts 
are  the  highlands  of  north  England  and  of  Scotland,  the  hills 
of  the  south,  and  the  eastern  plain,  where  the  Lincolnshire  and 
Romney  Marsh  sheep  have  developed  an  unusual  ability  to  sur- 
vive on  moist  level  land.  Great  Britain,  with  one-half  as  many 
sheep  as  people  (1913),  had  slightly  fewer  sheep  per  thousand 
people  than  the  United  States,  and  in  actual  number  about  one- 
third  as  many  as  Australia,  one  and  a  half  times  as  many  as 
France,  four  times  as  many  as  Germany,  one  and  a  half  times  as 
many  as  Spain,  but  only  two-thirds  as  many  as  Russia,  which, 
on  account  of  its  great  size  and  somewhat  arid  eastern  part,  is 
the  leading  sheep  and  cattle  country  of  Europe.  But  sheep  have 
declined  in  Russia  as  in  all  western  Europe,  although  a  recent 
report  to  the  Russian  Department  of  Agriculture  states  that  the 
country  is  capable  of  maintaining  300  million.  If  so,  it  would 
be  at  the  expense  of  other  production,  or  the  result  of  a  great 
improvement  in  agriculture. 

SHEEP   IN   THE   MEDITERRANEAN   BASIN   AND   CENTRAL   EURASIA 

The  California  climate,  with  its  winter  rain  and  dry  summer, 
is  very  wholesome  for  sheep,  especially  if  they  can  have  moun- 
tain pastures,  which  stay  green  all  summer.  The  similar  climate 
of  the  Mediterranean  countries  of  Europe,  Africa,  and  west  Asia 
produces  another  region  where  sheep  do  well  if  the  food  be 
present.  In  this  belt  is  Spain,  with  as  many  sheep  as  Germany, 
and  Bulgaria,  mountainous  and  dry  like  Spain,  also  equals  Ger- 


SHEEP  IN  THE  EURASIAN  DESERT  EDGE        291 

many  m  the  number  of  sheep  (see  previous  figures),  Turkey  in 
Europe,  mountainous,  and  with  dry  summers,  has  more  sheep 
per  square  mile  than  any  other  country  of  Europe.  In  Italy  the 
sheep  have  the  central  and  southern  pastures,  while  the  cattle 
and  milch  cows  feed  on  the  succulent  forage  of  irrigated  Lom- 
bardy. 

In  the  dry  region  of  southeastern  Russia  the  conditions  of 
the  American  and  Argentine  ranch  country  are  nearly  dupli- 
cated. Much  of  Siberia  and  central  Asia,  with  its  thousands 
of  miles  of  plains  or  steppes,  is  too  dry  for  anything  but  pastur- 
ages. Some  estimates  credit  Asiatic  Russia  with  a  much  higher 
number  of  sheep  than  that  given  in  the  table  (page  289). 

Sheep  are  very  common  and  very  important  in  semi-arid 
Asia  Minor,  Persia,  Afghanistan,  the  mountainous  parts  of 
India,  Thibet,  Manchuria,  and  the  interior  dependencies  of 
China.  From  all  these  countries  there  is  an  export  to  the  West- 
ern World  of  the  coarse  wool  yielded  by  the  hardy  native  sheep 
belonging  to  those  careless  Asiatic  peoples  who  have  never  pos- 
sessed themselves  of  the  better  breeds  of  western  Europe,  and 
who  contribute  little  to  the  food  supply  of  the  outside  world. 
Throughout  this  whole  region,  from  the  Bosphorus  to  the 
Amur  Valley,  the  sheep  live  almost  entirely  by  pasture,  which 
is  subject  to  the  cruel  uncertainties  of  climate;  and  despite  the 
shifting  of  flocks  from  place  to  place,  as  described  in  the  Book 
of  Genesis,  disasters  occasionally  occur.  "Unlooked-for  heavy 
snowstorms  occurred  in  January,  1911,  in  Asia  Minor.  In  the 
autumn  months  of  1910  almost  300,000  head  of  sheep,  one  and 
two  years  old,  had  started  overland  from  Suleimania,  Kerkook, 
and  Mosul  toward  Aleppo  and  Alexandria  to  be  shipped  to 
Alexandria,  Egypt,  for  mutton ;  ninety  per  cent,  perished  en 
route. ' ' 

SHEEP  IN   TROPIC    HIGHLANDS 

There  is  some  sheep  husbandry  for  local  use  throughout  the 
mountainous  regions  of  Mexico,  Central  America,  and  the  An- 
dean regions  of  South  America.  In  Ecuador,  Peru,  and  Bolivia, 
the  Andean  plateaus  spread  out  in  greater  expanse  and,  with 
their  rough  surface  and  cool  and  semi-arid  climate,  are  a  good 
place  for  sheep ;  there  is  an  export  of  wool  but  not  of  meat. 


292  THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

Since  sheep  flocks  are  declining  in  the  old  countries  and  the 
conditions  in  the  important  new  countries  remain  stationary,  it 
is  interesting  to  note  the  appearance  of  a  possible  new  region 
in  the  highlands  of  east  Africa.  Five  million  sheep  are  now 
reported  in  British  East  Africa,  but  most  of  them  of  the  native 
woolless  variety,  of  which  there  are  eight  million  in  all  Africa. 
Experiments  in  breeding  from  these  hardy  sheep  are  succeeding. 

(Pre-war) 

The  sheep  of  the  first  cross  shears  IVk  lb.  wool  worth. . .  5l/2C  per  lb. 
The  sheep  of  the  second  cross  shears  3  lb.  wool  worth. . .  15c  per  lb. 
The  sheep  of  the  third  cross  shears  4-5  lb.  wool  worth. . .  16c  per  lb. 


THE   GOAT 

The  goat,  sometimes  a  producer  of  wool,  zoologically  a  cousin 
of  the  sheep,  is  associated  with  him  throughout  the  world;  the 
chief  difference  between  the  two  is  the  goat's  ability  to  survive 
a  less  hospitable  environment  and  food  supply.  The  goat,  who 
will  cheerfully  steal  your  handkerchief  and  eat  it,  has  an  ability 
to  eat  almost  anything,  at  which  we  sometimes  make  merry,  but 
the  catholic  taste  indicates  that  it  is  one  of  the  hardiest  of  ani- 
mals, capable  of  living  under  the  most  severe  conditions.  Accord- 
ingly, where  land  is  good  and  pastures  are  fat,  goats  are  few; 
but  where  sheep  can  scarcely  subsist,  the  goat  thrives  on  the 
leaves  and  twigs  of  desert  and  mountain  shrubbery.  He  often 
but  not  always  fights  enemies  that  kill  the  sheep,  or  else  scrambles 
to  some  distant  height  for  safety.  The  semi-arid  countries,  there- 
fore, have  most  of  the  world's  100  million  goats  (pre-war).  Thus 
Mexico  is  credited  with  four  million,  more  than  the  United  States 
or  any  country  of  Europe;  Algeria  has  four  million;  Asiatic 
Turkey,  nine  million;  British  South  Africa,  twelve  million,  and 
British  India,  where  the  goat  is  both  a  meat  and  milk  animal,  is 
far  in  the  lead,  with  thirty-four  million.  The  result  is  that  goat 
skins,  which  with  sheep  skins  are  very  important  to  the  leather 
supply  of  the  world,  come  from  the  poorest  and  driest  countries 
of  the  world.  Many  are  exported  from  China,  whence  they 
are  brought  by  caravan  from  Mongolia  and  the  central  deserts 
of  Asia.  They  come  from  the  arid  parts  of  India,  from  Persia, 
from  Italy,  and  from  the  edge  of  the  Sahara.  Most  goats  are  of 


A  COMING  SCARCITY 


293 


commercial  value  only  on  account  of  their  skins;  but  in  the 
district  of  Angora,  Asia  Minor,  near  Anatolia,  has  been  devel- 
oped the  Angora  goat,  whose  long,  silken  fleece,  called  mohair, 
competes  with  wool  as  material  for  the  finer  fabrics. 


THE  FUTURE  SUPPLY  OF  WOOL  AND  MUTTON 

Unless  we  change  our  habits  with  regard  to  wool  and  mutton, 
the  future  supplies  of  these  articles  must  increase  in  order  to 
keep  up  with  increas- 
ing demand.  Yet 
during  the  last  quar- 
ter of  the  nineteenth 
century  the  number 
of  the  world's  sheep 
reached  its  maximum 
under  present  condi- 
tions of  production 
and  since  that  time 
has  actually  declined. 
As  most  of  the  new 
great  plains  are  fully 
occupied,  the  quan- 
tity of  mutton  can  be 
increased  only  by  im- 


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(Finch  and  Baker.) 

provements     in     the 

quality  of  the  sheep  themselves  and  intensification  of  agriculture, 
which  must  cause  a  greater  and  greater  portion  of  the  world's 
sheep  to  be  kept  on  farms  in  small  flocks  as  they  are  in  western 
Europe  and  eastern  United  States.  As  this  method,  with  costly 
land,  barns,  and  the  storing  of  winter  food,  is  more  expensive 
than  that  by  which  a  single  herder  drives  2,000  or  3,000  sheep 
over  a  fenceless,  barnless  plain,  costing  little  or  nothing,  the 
price  of  mutton  and  wool  seems  certain  to  rise. 

The  prospect  for  any  very  extensive  enlargement  is  not  bright. 
As  the  pressure  of  population  upon  the  animal  industries  be- 
comes greater,  we  may  expect  the  keeping  of  steers  to  give  place 
almost  entirely  to  the  keeping  of  dairy  cows  and  sheep.  The 
sheep  is  about  the  equal  of  the  steer  as  a  meat  producer,  with 


294  THE  MUTTON  SUPPLY 

the  added  advantage  of  a  fleece  which  is  at  present  indispensable 
to  wool-wearing  peoples.  A  certain  proportion  of  the  earth's 
surface  belongs  by  natural  right  to  sheep  and  goats,  because 
they  can  utilize  rough  land  and  dry  land;  but  when  sheep  and 
cows  compete  for  the  time  and  lands  of  the  farmer  with  well- 
tilled  fields,  the  incentive  of  high  prices  of  meat,  butter,  and 
cheese  on  the  one  hand  is  matched  by  those  of  meat  and  wool 
on  the  other.  Between  these  two  pressures  the  steer  is  doomed 
to  disappear. 

At  present  the  American  dog  restricts  this  competition,  but 
the  Americans  may  some  day  conclude  that  the  cur  dog  is  not 
worth  the  one  or  two  hundred  million  dollars  a  year  that  he  now 
costs  them,  and  through  them  the  whole  meat-eating,  wool- 
wearing  world. 

As  land  becomes  more  and  more  valuable,  the  daily  yield  of 
milk  in  comparison  to  the  annual  yield  of  wool  gives  the  great 
advantage  to  the  cow,  and  the  sheep  gives  way  as  in  Germany 
and  Belgium.  We  have  in  Japan  and  China  examples  of  popu- 
lation of  such  great  density  that  they  have  for  generations  had 
to  get  along  without  sheep,  clothing  themselves  in  silk  and  cotton 
almost  exclusively,  and  living  on  a  diet  of  little  meat,  or  milk, 
but  eating  fish,  cereals,  and  vegetables,  especially  vegetables. 
The  present  dearth  of  wool  and  mutton  is  indicative  of  future 
higher  prices,  relatively  smaller  supply,  and  better  use  of  land 
in  the  countries  of  small  population. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

QUALITIES    AND   DISTRIBUTION    OF   THE  HOG 

THE  nursery  jingle  about  the  lion  is  a  mistake.  He  is  not  the 
king  of  beasts.  The  hog  has  been  crowned  in  his  stead.  The 
British  did  it  during  the  fat  famine  of  the  Great  War. 

In  three  respects  the  pig  is  the  greatest  of  meat  animals:  (a) 
grant  him  food,  and  no  other  of  our  important  animals  can 
equal  him  in  the  amount  of  meat  that  he  will  produce;  (b)  no 
other  animal  equals  him  in  the  speed  of  growth,  and  (c)  no 
other  animal  equals  him  in  the  rapidity  with  which  he  will  in- 
crease. These  qualities  are  of  special  value  in  an  emergency 
when  sudden  increase  of  animals  is  needed.  If  we  desire  more 
horses,  we  can  have  one  ready  to  work  in  four  years.  If  we 
desire  more  cows,  we  can  have  one  ready  to  milk  in  three  years. 
If  we  desire  more  sheep,  we  can  have  a  lamb  ready  to  eat  in 
a  year,  or  one  ready  for  shearing  in  a  year  and  a  half.  But 
in  the  case  of  all  three  of  these  animals  the  rate  of  increase  is 
slow.  There  Is  no  reason  to  hope  for  100  per  cent,  increase  of 
horses  and  cattle  in  a  year,  although,  like  the  sheep,  they  give 
birth  to  young  once  a  year.  Among  the  sheep,  twins,  and  occa- 
sionally triplets,  are  born  often  enough  for  a  good  flock  with 
care  sometimes  to  exceed  100  per  cent,  increase. 

In  comparison  with  these  animals  the  fecundity  cf  the  hog 
is  amazing.  We  resolve  in  the  autumn  to  increase  the  pork  sup- 
ply. In  the  spring  the  sow  brings  forth  a  brood  of  eight  or  ten, 
and  another  in  late  summer,  so  that  she  may  with  care  have 
from  twelve  to  twenty  offspring  ready  to  be  eaten  within  twelve 
or  thirteen  months.  The  spring  litter,  seven  to  eight  months 
old,  will  be  at  their  maximum  efficiency  and  weigh  200  pounds 
apiece.  The  August  litter,  100  hundred  days  old,  by  December 
may  weigh  100  pounds  apiece,  so  that  one  mother  may  produce 

295 


296    SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

in  twelve  months  eight  offspring  weighing  1,600  pounds,  and 
eight  others  weighing  800  pounds — an  amount  of  meat  equal  to 
that  of  a  whole  flock  of  sheep  or  three  two-year-old  cattle — 
provided,  of  course,  food  supplies  are  sufficient.*  We  here  see 
one  of  the  reasons  why  the  hog  is  the  most  common  of  all  domes- 
tic animals  save  the  dog.  Another  reason  for  wide  distribution 
is  his  catholicity  of  taste  in  diet.  He  can  eat  anything  and 
digest  anything. 

Swine  are  the  meat  animals  of  grain-growing  lands,  as  is  the 
sheep  of  grass-growing  lands  and  the  goat  of  bush  and  shrub- 
producing  lands.  Thus  pastoral  Australia  has  100  sheep  to  one 
hog,  and  Iowa,  a  great  corn  state,  has  seven  hogs  to  one  sheep. 
Just  across  one  state  from  Iowa  is  Wyoming — another  land  of 
grass,  where  there  are  more  than  sixty  sheep  to  one  hog.  The 
hog  was  originally  an  animal  of  forest  countries,  living  on  con- 
centrated foods,  such  as  acorns,  nuts,  grubs,  and  rich  roots, 
which  his  strong  snout  admirably  excavates.  Consequently  he 
must  have  somewhat  similar  foods  when  domesticated,  since  his 
small  stomach  is  not  adapted  to  a  diet  of  bulky  grasses.f  His 
appetite  and  digestion  are  amazing  and  enable  him  to  lay  up 
nutritive  treasure  for  his  own  future.  In  his  original  forest 
home1  he  converted  the  abundance  of  autumn  nuts  into  a  thick 
layer  of  fat  which  covered  his  body  and  carried  him  through 
the  hungry  time  of  winter  while  he  slept  in  a  bed  of  leaves. 
Therefore,  the  rich  grains  of  the  farm  exactly  suit  him,  and  he 
encases  himself  in  fat  at  every  opportunity. 

He  is  still  fond  of  the  nuts  and  acorns  of  his  original  forest 
home,  but  is  able  to  eat  anything,  from  a  piece  of  beefsteak  from 
the  garbage  can  to  the  weeds  which  his  owner  pulls  from  the 
garden.  This  makes  him  a  fine  saver  of  edible  odds  and  ends. 
Tame,  harmless,  hardy,  and  fecund,  the  hog  is  an  admirable 
door-yard  scavenger  and  meat-producer  for  the  cottagers  of 
many  lands,  and  has  attained  an  almost  world-wide  distribution, 
being  of  great  local  importance  as  a  food  supply  in  many  coun- 

*In  1018  the  winning  pig  in  the  Bucks  County,  Pennsylvania,  boy's  pig 
club  weighed  27!)  pounds  at  140  days  old.  It  cost  10*£  cents  a  pound  to 
produce  him  and  he  sold  for  26  cents  per  pound.  The  second  in  the  con- 
test weighed  253  pounds. 

t  The  dressed  weight  of  a  hog  is  about  eighty  per  cent,  of  his  live 
weight,  while  the  pasturing  cattle  and  sheep  have  such  large  stomachs  that 
they  yield  only  about  fifty  per  cent,  of  meat. 


THE  OMNIVOROUS,  OMNIPRESENT  PIG  297 

tries  where  he  is  of  no  commercial  value.  He  is  the  friend  of  the 
new  settler  in  British  Columbia,  and  also  of  the  new  settlers  in 
Siberia — the  peasants  in  the  old  home  lands  of  Russia,  or  of  Ire- 
land, where  he  is  sometimes  affectionately  called  the  "gint  who 
pays  the  rint."  He  lives  near  the  shack  of  the  half-breed  Indian 
of  Mexico  and  South  America,  and  is  as  friendly  to  the  Spanish 
and  Italian  immigrant  in  Argentina  as  he  is  to  the  inhabitants 
of  the  stone  houses  in  the  old  countries  in  Europe.  He  is  as 
much  at  home  beneath  the  shack  of  the  negro  in  the  West  Indies 
as  by  the  palm-leaf  hut  on  the  banks  of  the  Congo  or  the  coast 
of  Guinea.  In  the  eastern  world  he  is  common  in  China,  Malay- 
sia, Australasia,  and  the  mid-Pacific,  where,  in  at  least  one 
group  of  coral  islands,  the  price  of  a  dusky  bride  is  from  ten 
to  twenty  pigs. 


HOGS  THAT   RANGE   IN   FORESTS 

He  has  been  long  domesticated  and  developed  into  many 
breeds,  but  many  of  his  kind  still  fatten  on  his  original  diet 
of  mast,  the  natural  product  of  the  forest.  In  many  parts  of 
the  United  States  the  hogs  run  in  the  farm  wood  lot  or  the  open 
forest,  where  the  fallen  mast  provides  a  large  part  of  their 
food.  This  method  is  customary  in  the  Appalachian  highlands, 
in  the  Ozarks  of  Missouri  and  Arkansas,  and  in  many  parts  of 
the  South  Atlantic  and  Gulf  States.  An  oft-told  tale  narrates 
the  discomfiture  of  a  Northern  swine  grower  who  took  some  fine 
plump  porkers  with  bodies  like  watermelons  to  an  agricultural 
fair  in  the  cotton-belt.  Despite  the  great  superiority  of  his 
pigs,  the  prizes  went  to  long-legged,  slab-sided,  sharp-backed 
natives  commonly  known  as  razor-backs.  "No,  siree,"  he  was 
told,  upon  inquiry,  "them  hawgs  of  yourn  won't  do  down  heah. 
They  haven't  got  no  speed.  A  hawg  that  can't  beat  a  niggah 
to  a  swamp's  got  no  show  in  this  country,  and  ain't  worth 
havin'.  Youah  hawgs  may  be  all  right  fer  up  Nawth." 

Great  injury  to  the  Southern  pine  forests  often  results  from 
the  uprooting  of  the  young  pine  tree,  which  the  hog  kills  by 
eating  the  succulent  taproot.  In  the  Southern  States,  salt  pork, 
easily  kept  in  a  warm  climate,  is  the  staple  meat  food  of  the 
working  man,  white  and  black  alike.  Its  use  is  a  good  example 


298    SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

of  the  value  of  meat  as  a  stimulant  and  flavorer.  Salt  pork  is 
savory,  and  a  little  of  it  is  the  life  of  a  meal  made  up  largely 
of  corn  bread  and  potatoes,  sweet  or  white.  The  fat  of  the 
pork,  mostly  fried,  replaces  butter  in  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  families  in  warm  regions  where  dairy  products  are  but  little 
known.  (See  chapter  on  Dairy  Products.) 

Hogs  fatten  in  many  European  forests.  An  important  hog- 
raising  district  is  located  in  southwestern  Germany,  where  the 
animals  can  roam  the  beech  forests  and  live  on  the  beech  nuts. 
In  Servia,  hogs,  largely  mast  fed,  hold  the  important  position 
of  chief  export.  The  fertile  valleys  of  this  mountainous  country 
were,  before  the  desolation  of  the  three  wars,  carefully  farmed 
chiefly  for  wheat  and  corn,  but  in  the  oak  and  beech  forests  of  the 
mountains  there  is  excellent  feeding  ground  for  hogs,  which  were 
sent  to  Budapest,  Vienna,  and  Germany. 

This  method  of  producing  pork  is  of  some  importance  in  all 
the  Mediterranean  countries,  but  is  most  highly  developed  in 
Spain  and  Portugal,  where  cork  forests  cover  large  areas  and 
yield  an  occasional  harvest  of  cork  and  a  biennial  harvest  of 
acorns,  gathered  by  the  pasturing  pigs.  Another  oak  (ilex  or 
evergreen)  is  an  important  timber  tree  and  also  yields  an  abun- 
dance of  acorns.  These  two  species  of  oaks  together  produce 
from  one-half  to  two-thirds  of  all  the  pork  grown  in  Spain  and 
Portugal.  But  upon  the  whole  the  mast-fed  hog  is  of  relatively 
small  importance  in  comparison  with  the  grain-fed  hog  and  the 
potato-fed  hog. 

RELATION   OF   THE   HOG   INDUSTRY   TO   GRAIN   GROWING 

Since  the  hog  must  have  some  kind  of  concentrated  food, 
such  as  acorns,  nuts,  or  grain,  he  is  naturally  raised  in  the 
regions  producing  cheap  grains.  The  chief  regions  with  hogs 
for  export,  therefore,  are  those  with  much  corn  or  barley,  the 
great  forage  grains  of  the  Western  World.  Since  corn  has  long 
been  the  cheapest  and  also  the  most  fattening  of  the  grains, 
the  corn-belt  of  the  United  States  is  the  leading  hog-exporting 
region  of  the  whole  world.  Twice  as  many  hogs  are  found  in 
the  United  States,  chiefly  in  this  corn-belt,  as  in  any  other  two 
countries  of  the  world.  Half  the  hogs  of  America  are  found  in 


THE  AMERICAN  CORN  BELT  299 

the  seven  corn-belt  states:  Ohio,  Indiana,  Illinois,  Iowa,  Mis- 
souri, Kansas,  and  Nebraska.  The  farmer  in  Iowa,  Kansas,  or 
Nebraska  nearly  always  grows  one  or  two  fields  of  corn,  and 
often  keeps  from  twenty  to  one  hundred  hogs,  which  he  feeds  al- 
most entirely  on  the  corn.  Fully  one-third  of  the  American  crop 
goes  to  the  market  in  the  form  of  pork.  The  distribution  of 
hogs  within  the  corn-belt  reflects  an  interesting  phase  of  agri- 


FIG.  100. — Compare  this  with  the  corn  production  map,   Fig.  43,  to  see 
cause  and  effect.     (Finch  and  Baker.) 

cultural  economics.  Maps  of  hog  distribution  (see  page  299)  and 
of  corn  distribution  (see  Fig.  43)  show  that  while  the  center 
of  corn  growing  is  in  east-central  Illinois,  a  region  from  100  to 
150  miles  around  Chicago,  has  far  fewer  hogs  than  have  the  dis- 
tricts beyond.  Because  of  the  lower  freight  rate  to  the  Chicago 
market,  the  corn  of  eastern  Illinois  is  worth  five  cents  more  on 
the  farm  than  is  the  corn  of  Iowa.  As  it  takes  several  pounds 
of  corn  to  make  a  pound  of  pork,  pork  is  better  able  to  pay 
transportation,  so  that  distant  places  produce  pork  and  nearby 
places  produce  market  corn,  which  is  made  into  glucose  or 
shipped  to  eastern  cities,  and  to  Europe. 

Hog  production  extends  to  the  northward  of  the  American 
corn-belt  as  a  by-product  of  the  dairy  industry.    A  large  amount 


300    SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

of  skim  milk  is  left  over  from  the  manufacture  of  butter.  (See 
map  of  milch  cows,  Fig.  86).  There  is  no  better  food  for  grow- 
ing pigs  than  skim  milk,  combined  with  corn  and  barley  or  any 
other  grain  product,  and  a  little  alfalfa  and  clover  hay.  Hence 
hogs  are  grown  in  the  dairy  districts  of  the  United  States  and 
Canada,  even  where  corn  is  of  minor  importance.  In  the  western 
half  of  the  United  States,  beyond  the  one-hundredth  meridian 
in  Kansas,  and  beyond  the  region  of  extensive  corn  growing, 
the  number  of  hogs  is  so  small  that  they  do  not  meet  the  needs 
of  the  scanty  population.  There  are  more  hogs  in  Iowa  than 
in  all  the  Rocky  Mountain  and  Pacific  States,  and  all  the  Atlan- 
tic States  north  of  Georgia.  Owing  to  his  small  digestive  tract, 
the  hog  cannot  pick  his  forage  and  thrive  on  the  dry  range  like 
sheep,  goats,  and  cattle.  He  is,  therefore,  limited  in  the  dry 
country  to  the  irrigated  localities,  where  he  can  get  alfalfa  and 
grain,  chiefly  barley.  The  great  bulk  of  the  American  pork 
crop  depends  on  corn. 

Owing  to  the  great  ability  of  this  grain  to  produce  fat,  the 
American  hog  is  often  called  the  "lard  hog,"  because  of  the 
large  amount  of  lard  (melted  fat)  he  makes.  He  is  quite  dif- 
ferent from  the  so-called  "bacon  hog"  of  the  barley-growing 
districts  of  Canada  and  Europe.  Owing  to  the  fact  that  barley 
yields  less  grain  and  therefore  costs  more  to  produce  than  does 
corn  in  the  corn-belt,  the  pork-raisers  of  Canada  and  Europe 
feed  their  pigs  as  much  as  possible  on  grass,  especially  clover. 
This  food,  rich  in  protein,  produces  more  lean  meat  in  the  pig's 
body  than  does  the  corn  diet;  for  this  reason  the  famed  Irish, 
Danish,  and  English  breakfast  bacon  has  the  streaks  of  lean 
with  the  fat.  Because  of  this  desired  leanness,  some  English 
bacon  is  in  times  of  peace  imported  into  the  United  States, 
although  we  have  many  millions  more  hogs  than  any  other 
country,  and  send  vast  quantities  of  cheaper  pork  to  England 
and  Ireland.  At  the  same  time  that  Ireland  imports  American 
pork,  it  produces  bacon  of  high  quality,  which  is  exported  to  the 
English  market. 

Despite  the  importance  of  the  United  States  in  the  pork  trade 
of  the  world,  Europe  with  its  intensive  agriculture  had,  before 
the  outbreak  of  the  Great  War,  more  hogs  than  the  United 
States.  At  the  present  moment  she  has  far  fewer;  but  they  will 


EUROPEAN  SWINE 


301 


return  with  returning  forage  supply.  The  great  European  pork 
region  is  in  the  lands  touching  the  North  and  Baltic  Seas:  Bel- 
gium, Holland,  Germany,  and  Denmark.  In  this  region  swine 
are  fed  chiefly  on  barley  and  potatoes,  with  some  imported  corn, 
but  in  Germany  alone  600,000,000  bushels  of  potatoes  in  normal 
times,  forty  per  cent,  of  the  crop,  are  fed  to  pigs.  It  is  only 
in  Hungary  that  the  European  pigs  gets  much  home-grown 


EUROPE 

SWINE 
NUMBER 
UCH  DOT  mntlKNTI  I 


Fio.  101. — Compare  this  with  the  potato,  Fig  .11,  and  oat,  Fig.  30, 
maps  of  Europe.     (Finch  and  Baker.) 

corn.  In  Denmark,  with  its  enormous  butter  trade,  we  find  skim 
milk  used  for  pork  production,  as  in  the  American  dairy-belt. 
It  is  probable  that  no  people  prosecute  the  pork  industry  so  sys- 
tematically as  do  the  Danes.  The  experts  of  the  Farmers'  Co- 
operative Pork  Packing  Societies  have  found  that  the  English 
market  prefers  a  certain  kind  of  bacon  from  a  hog  of  a  certain 
size,  with  a  certain  amount  of  lean  and  fat.  They  have  found 
that  this  bacon  can  be  best  produced  by  a  cross-bred  pig  of  certain 
breeds;  therefore,  some  farmers  make  a  business  of  raising  pure- 
bred females  of  the  recommended  mother  breed  and  others  raise 
pure-bred  males  of  the  recommended  sire  breed,  for  sale  to  the 
average  farmer,  who  raises  the  cross-bred  market  pig.  Experi- 


CTATC   TITAP'   CD    C 


302    SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

ments  have  shown  that  certain  food  combinations  bring  this 
cross-bred  pig  to  the  good  ham  and  bacon  stage  with  a  minimum 
of  food  per  pound  of  pork  in  seven  months;  he  then  weighs 
200  to  225  pounds,  and  goes  to  one  of  the  thirty-four  Farmers' 
Co-operative  Pork  Packing  plants  of  Denmark. 

The  Danish  Co-operative  Pork  Packing  Society  sells  its  product 
to  the  English  co-operative  wholesale  stores,  which  in  turn  pass 


FIG.  102. — Hogging  down  corn — the  cheapest  method  of  harvesting. 
(Courtesy  Country  Gentleman} 

it  on  to  the  retail  co-operative  stores  scattered  throughout  Brit- 
ain. Profits  are  thus  divided  between  producer  and  consumer. 
In  America  the  government  issues  a  report  every  so  often  telling 
us  that  we  have  a  meat  trust.  In  Denmark  everybody  fits  into 
one,  and  doesn't  complain. 

Germany  is  second  only  to  the  United  States  in  its  number 
of  hogs.  Perhaps  it  was  jealousy  that  made  a  fellow-student  in 
a  German  university  assure  me  twenty  years  ago  that  all  Ameri- 
cans were  "Schweinhiindler."  There  is  no  good  reason  why 
the  industry  should  not  be  as  important  in  parts  of  Russia  and 


PORK  THE  MEAT  OF  THE  FUTURE      SOS 

Poland  near  Germany,  except  for  the  lesser  aid  and  attention 
from  the  government. 

Some  pigs  are  kept  in  the  Orient,  for  even  on  the  almost 
vegetarian  farm  of  the  Chinese  garden  farmer  there  is  Home 
material  which  the  pig  can  convert  into  edible  and  more  valu- 
able form. 


THR   FUTURE   SUPPLY   OF   PORK 

The  Food  Administration  of  the  United  States  has  pointed 
out,  to  the  disadvantage  of  the  pig,  particularly  in  America,  that, 
next  to  poultry,  he  most  nearly  resembles  man  in  the  grains 
he  cats,  whereas  sheep  and  cattle  eat  coarse  herbage  that  is  by 
us  inedible.  The  county  farm  agents  in  nearly  all  states,  how- 
ever, are  with  great  emphasis  urging  the  farmers  to  adopt  a 
practice  which  reduces  the  pig's  grain  consumption  and  at  the 
same  time  increases  his  productivity:  namely,  the  growth  of  con- 
centrated forage  crops  which  the  pig  himself  can  eat  where; 
they  grow,  with  consequent  reduction  in  the  labor  and  cost  of 
production.  Thus  in  April  the  pig  may  be  eating  the  green 
herbage  of  a  field  of  barley.  He  may  spend  May  and  June  in 
a  clover  field.  In  July  he  may  go  back  to  the  barley  field  and 
eat  the  grain  as  it  stands.  In  August  and  September  fields  of 
beans,  called  cowpcas,  and  soy  beans,  arc  ready  for  him.  So  are 
sweet  potatoes  or  peanuts,  which  he  dearly  loves.  In  October 
he  goes  into  the  corn  field  and  harvests  it  himself,  "hogging- 
down"  as  it  is  called.  In  late  November,  with  this  succession 
of  harvests  upon  his  ribs,  he  is  ready  for  the  packer. 

This  system  is  being  followed  by  increasing  numbers  of  farm- 
ers in  many  localities,  and  is  especially  useful  in  the  South, 
where  the  long  growing  season  permits  many  crops.  It  will 
greatly  help  to  extend  the  world's  pork  production,  as  will  also 
the  extermination  of  the  swine  plague,  which  has  yearly  killed 
its  millions  of  hogs  in  America,  but  which  can  largely  be  con- 
trolled by  the  use  of  serums. 

There  is,  on  the  whole,  however,  no  reason  to  expect  that  pork 
will  ever  be  any  more  plentiful  than  it  was  before  the  war.  The 
really  significant  thing  about  the  pork  supply  is  shown  by  the 
relative  numbers  of  pigs  and  people.  In  1840  there  were  in  the 


304    SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

United  States  154  pigs  per  100  people.  In  1910  there  were 
sixty-three.  In  Europe  there  were  about  fifteen,  and  in  China 
there  were  much  fewer.  Since  we  cannot  have  both  bread  and 
meat  in  indefinite  quantities,  the  increased  use  of  grain  must 
lead  us  to  class  all  the  meat  animals  among  the  things  we  cannot 
eat.  In  time  the  pig  will  be  reduced  to  a  scavenger  for  the 


FIG.   103. — Inoculating  the  pig  to  prevent  hog  cholera.     (U.  S.  Dept  Agr.) 

humid  lands,  as  the  sheep  and  goats  arc  scavengers  for  the  arid 
lands.  Where  land  is  precious,  the  good  forage  goes  to  the 
dairy  cow,  who,  after  her  service  to  the  dairy  is  rendered,  will 
constitute  an  ever-increasing  proportion  of  the  meat  supply  of 
a  large  and  increasing  population. 

POULTRY 

A  few  years  ago  Mr.  H.  Rider  Haggard,  the  English  novelist, 
who  is  also  a  land-owner,  and  much  interested  in  rural  better- 
ment, went  to  Denmark  to  investigate  the  rural  co-operation 


THE  RESPONSIBLE  EGG  305 

which  has  replaced  poverty  and  despair  with  comfort  and  con- 
tentment in  that  cool  and  sandy  little  country.  On  his  first 
morning  in  Copenhagen  he  called  for  boiled  eggs.  They  came 
with  printing  on  their  shells.  When  he  was  examining  the 
eggs,  the  printing,  after  the  fashion  of  a  rubber  stamp,  was 
transferred  to  his  hand,  and  there  was  not  enough  soap  in 
all  Denmark  to  wash  it  off  in  the  space  of  two  days,  during 
which  time  he  went  about  numbered  No.  174  and  initialed 
D.  A.  A.  G.,  N.  P.  Upon  investigation  he  found  that  this  let- 
tering signified  literally  that  he  was  a  good  egg  from  the  Dan- 
ish Co-operative  Association,  Branch  174.  He  further  found 
that  this  branch  was  located  on  the  Island  of  Falster  in  the 
Baltic  Sea,  and  that  N.  P.  was  Nils  Poulsen,  the  Danish  peasant 
who  had  turned  in  that  particular  egg.  If  the  egg  had  been 
bad,  the  thrifty  Nils  would  have  been  fined  something  like  $1.40. 
If  he  had  turned  in  another  bad  egg,  the  fine  would  have  been 
increased.  If  he  had  turned  in  a  third,  he  would  have  been 
expelled  from  membership  in  the  egg  society — three  terrible  ca- 
lamities for  a  thrifty  Danish  farmer.  That  is  the  kind  of  in- 
dividual responsibility  that  has  made  Denmark  great  in  the 
egg  market  as  in  the  realm  of  butter  and  bacon. 

In  the  main,  however,  in  the  poultry  and  egg  business  men  in 
both  Europe  and  America  have  continued  to  demonstrate  the 
inefficiency  of  individual  and  unorganized  effort.  The  hen  has 
also  been  intellectually  neglected.  Despite  her  almost  universal 
service  as  food-producer  and  the  enormous  total  value  of  her 
product,  the  hen  has  been  strangely  let  alone  as  a  subject  of 
discussion  by  economists  and  publicists.  Wheat,  cotton,  iron, 
and  gold  seem  constantly  in  the  scientific,  industrial,  and  finan- 
cial mind,  if  we  may  judge  from  the  number  of  books,  treatises, 
articles,  and  statistical  analyses  pertaining  to  them.  If  you  say 
"iron,"  men  look  wise  and  serious.  If  you  say  hens,  they  grin. 
The  intellectual  neglect  of  the  lowly  hen  is  not  due  to  her  lack 
of  value,  for  the  poultry  and  eggs  of  the  United  States  (worth 
about  800  million  dollars  a  year  before  the  war)  are  normally  of 
more  value  than  the  wheat  crop,  the  cotton  crop,  or  the  hay  crop, 
and  are  exceeded  in  value  only  by  the  corn  crop.  The  value  of 
the  peace-time  output  of  all  our  pig-iron  furnaces  is  far  ex- 
ceeded by  the  value  of  our  poultry  and  eggs.  This  lack  of  inter- 


306    SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

est  may  be  partly  explained  by  the  universality  of  production, 
the  non-capitalistic  character  of  production,  the  difficulty  of  se- 
curing statistics,  the  absence  of  large  financial  or  speculative 
operations  in  connection  with  poultry  and  eggs,  the  small  in- 
fluence of  legislation  upon  them,  and  the  small  part  they  play 
in  international  trade.  Poultry-farming  is  none  the  less  im- 
portant and  is  undoubtedly  the  most  universal  form  of  animal 
industry  in  the  United  States  and  also  in  Europe,  eastern  Asia, 
and  other  foreign  countries.  The  names  of  breeds  attest  their 
world-wide  distribution — Peking  and  Muscovy  ducks;  Cochin, 
Brahma,  Leghorn,  Hamburg,  Minorca,  Indian  Game,  Wyandotte, 
and  Plymouth  Rock  chickens;  Brabant  geese. 

Fowls  are  found  to  some  extent  in  great  cities  and  are  kept 
in  villages  as  well  as  on  farms  throughout  the  United  States. 
They  are  usually  a  by-product,  often  a  perquisite  of  the  farmer's 
wife.  The  very  large  majority  of  the  fowls  in  the  United  States 
are  found  in  comparatively  small  groups  (forty  to  fifty  per 
farm)  on  a  very  large  number  of  farms,  where  they  gather  their 
own  subsistence  and  receive  practically  no  care.  Consequently 
the  eggs  are  produced  at  little  cost.  This  industry  may  easily 
be  much  further  developed. 

The  commercial  production  of  poultry  and  eggs  will  un- 
doubtedly result  in  increased  cost.  Emphasis  should  be  laid 
upon  the  service  rendered  by  these  birds  in  the  United  States 
as  scavengers  in  getting  material  that  would  otherwise  go  to 
waste,  and  converting  it  into  good  food.  The  dooryard  hen 
catches  flies,  cleans  up  the  table-scraps  to  the  last  crumb,  eats 
grass,  digs  through  the  barnyard  manure  for  stray  grains  of 
corn,  scratches  up  the  ground  for  worms,  hunts  along  the  road- 
way, and  cleans  the  fields.  She  pecks  fallen  fruit,  and  also  dig- 
geth  up  the  garden  and  produceth  vexation  in  the  flower  bed. 
She  will  even  establish  her  nest  secretly,  hatch  a  brood  of  ten 
or  fifteen  chickens,  and  bring  them  up  to  the  eating  stage  with- 
out the  knowledge  of  the  farmer  or  his  wife. 

The  turkey,  yet  nearer  to  nature,  spreads  her  growing  brood 
of  ten  or  twenty  in  a  broad  phalanx  from  three  to  six  feet  apart, 
and  thus  they  range  the  grain  fields  after  harvest,  picking  the 
green  grass,  rescuing  shattered  grain,  and  spearing  the  spring- 
ing grasshopper  with  unerring  aim,  quite  unmindful  of  the  last 


SCIENTIFIC  POULTRY  PRODUCTION  307 

Thursday  in  November,  or  any  other  of  man's  feasts.  In  the 
table  of  food  values  per  acre  (see  page  182)  poultry  make  a 
very  bad  showing  in  comparison  to  the  grains,  dairying,  and 
even  the  other  meat  animals,  but  they  render  an  irreplaceable 
service  by  converting  grass,  insects,  grain,  and  waste  material 
into  the  easily  digestible  egg,  and  into  the  delicious  meat  of 
their  bodies.  The  egg  is  unusual  in  having  ninety-seven  per 
cent,  of  its  edible  portion  digestible.  Like  milk  and  unlike  meat, 
it  cannot  be  changed  in  our  bodies  into  uric  acid,  and  in  addi- 
tion to  protein  (the  chief  product  of  the  white)  it  also  furnishes 
fat,  the  chief  product  of  the  yolk,  and  a  number  of  valuable 
mineral  elements,  including  sulphur,  phosphorus,  iron,  calcium, 
and  magnesium,  in  an  easily  utilizable  form.  It  also  contains  the 
indispensable  vitamines  discussed  in  the  chapter  on  Dairy 
Products. 

There  has  been  a  marked  increase  in  the  number  of  specialized 
poultry  farms  since  1900.  One  of  the  causes  of  this  change 
is  the  work  done  by  the  mechanical  incubator,  which  works  on 
a  very  large  scale  as  successfully  as  the  hen,  who  is  thus  free 
to  devote  her  whole  time  to  the  production  of  eggs. 

Poultry  farming  can  equally  well  be  a  by-product  in  exten- 
sive agriculture  or  a  main  product  in  intensive  agriculture,  with 
a  strong  tendency  to  become  important  as  agriculture  becomes 
intensive.  Egg  production  predominates  over  the  less  intensive 
poultry  selling  (meat  production)  in  all  parts  of  the  United 
States  except  the  region  south  of  the  Potomac  and  Ohio  rivers, 
which  have  no  local  markets  of  importance,  and  parts  of  the 
corn-belt,  which  have  unusual  opportunities  to  fatten  poultry. 
In  Maine  and  New  Hampshire  the  value  of  the  eggs  is  about 
double  that  of  the  poultry.  The  relation  of  poultry  raising  to 
intensification  is  well  shown  in  Canada.  In  1902  the  value  of 
Canada's  egg  export  amounted  to  nearly  $2,000,000.  It  rapidly 
decreased  until,  in  1910,  eggs  were  imported  from  China  and 
Russia.  The  great  development  of  railroads  and  wheat  in  west- 
ern Canada  had  enlarged  the  Canadian  market  and  afforded 
a  new  business  opportunity  for  the  people  of  the  Eastern  Prov- 
inces who  had  before  exported  eggs.  Moreover,  the  egg  pro- 
ducers of  Denmark  and  Russia  studied  their  business  and  ex- 
celled the  Canadians  just  as  the  Canadians  excelled  the  Ameri- 


308    SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

cans  at  cheese  production.  When  the  war  shut  off  the  British 
supply  of  eggs  from  the  Continent  and  the  price  rose, 
Canada  again  began  to  export  them  to  Britain,  her  ship- 
ments increasing  from  3,000,000  dozen  in  1913  to  14,000,000 
in  1916. 

During  the  period  of  development  in  the  western  United 
States,  the  poultry  industry  in  that  country  went  through  the 
same  fluctuation  as  in  Canada.  In  1870  the  construction  of 
railroads  and  the  development  of  the  West  began,  and  in  1872 
the  egg  imports  suddenly  rose  to  five  million  dozen.  From 
1882  to  1890  fifteen  million  dozen  per  year  were  imported,  then 
suddenly  the  number  decreased  during  the  next  four  years  and 
the  number  exported  rose  steadily  from  1897  to  1911,  when  it 
reached  eight  million  dozen. 

China  affords  the  best  evidence  of  the  suitability  of  the  poul- 
try industry  to  intensive  agriculture.  It  is  the  general  testi- 
mony of  travelers  that  enormous  numbers  of  poultry  are  grown, 
and  eggs  are  exported.  Before  the  war,  factories  in  Tsingtau, 
German  China,  converted  millions  of  dozens  yearly  into  dried 
eggs,  dried  yolks  and  albumen  (dried  white  of  egg).  By  this 
means,  1,000  eggs  can  be  reduced  to  twenty-two  pounds' 
weight,  can  be  easily  transported,  and  are  said  to  keep 
indefinitely. 

The  price  of  eggs  in  China  helps  to  explain  how  the  Chinese 
have  been  able  to  live  at  all  on  the  very  low  wages  of  which 
we  hear.  China  is  so  isolated,  such  a  world  to  itself,  that  it 
has  had  a  set  of  prices  all  its  own — low  prices,  so  that  the  low- 
wage  man  bought  low-priced  commodities.  A  dozen  years  ago 
eggs  cost  four  to  five  cash  (two  cents  per  dozen,  U.  S.  gold), 
at  Yangtse  ports.  Then  the  government  abolished  the  old  cur- 
rency. The  ten-cash  piece  (cent)  is  the  smallest  coin,  and  eggs 
were  five  to  six  and  two-third  cents  per  dozen  at  Shanghai  in  1911 
and  1912.  F.  H.  King  (Farmers  of  Forty  Centuries,  p.  180), 
found  eggs  in  early  April,  1910,  selling  near  Shanghai,  at  forty- 
eight  cents  (American  gold)  per  hundred;  little  chicks  at  $1.29 
per  hundred.  At  the  same  place  the  wage  of  a  man  per  ten- 
hour  day  was  twenty-four  cents,  the  price  of  four  and  one-sixth 
dozen  eggs — a  fact  which  suggests  interesting  comparisons  with 
Western  conditions. 


THE  EGG  EXPORT  309 

The  greatest  commerce  in  eggs  and,  with  the  possible  excep- 
tion of  China,  the  greatest  production,  is  in  Europe.  Great 
Britain  imports  far  more  eggs  than  all  the  rest  of  the  world 
combined,  over  215  million  dozen  in  1913.  Russia  sent  the  half 
of  them,  and  France,  Belgium,  Germany,  and  Denmark  were 
important  contributors.  Even  Morocco  and  Egypt  sent  more 
than  the  United  States.  The  war  greatly  reduced  this  import. 
British  imports  were  but  102  million  dozen  in  1915,  sixty-six 
million  in  1916.  In  that  year  Russia  succeeded  in  sending  only 
seven  million  dozen  in  place  of  the  114  million  of  1913.  As 
a  result  of  this  shortage  and  the  accompanying  high  prices, 
British  poultry  keeping  has  received  a  new  impetus.  In  March, 
1917,  a  poultry  demonstration  train  with  a  yard  of  six  pullets, 
and  lecturers,  was  creating  much  interest  in  the  textile  cities 
and  towns  where  intensive  poultry  keeping  was  being  advocated 
and  explained  to  large  audiences.  The  train  was  furnished, 
equipped,  and  manned  jointly  by  the  Northeastern  Railway,  the 
University  of  Leeds,  and  the  Yorkshire  Council  for  Agricultural 
Education. 

In  normal  times  the  European  peasant  farmer  finds  it  more 
important  to  sell  eggs  than  does  the  American  with  more  land, 
but  America  is  tending  rapidly  toward  the  same  conditions  as 
those  in  Europe,  as  is  shown  by  the  great  increase  in  the  poultry 
business.  The  conspicuous  thing  about  the  poultry  industry  of 
the  United  States  up  to  the  present  time  is  the  almost  entire 
absence  of  export.  In  this  respect  it  is  much  like  the  dairy 
industry,  and  for  the  same  reason.  As  yet  we  do  not  have  to 
export  eggs.  We  are  too  rich.  We  leave  that  diligent  task  to 
the  poorer  Irish,  Danes,  Russians,  and  Chinese. 

In  the  marketing,  especially  of  eggs,  great  improvement  is 
possible,  as  is  proved  by  recent  Irish  experience.  France  and 
Denmark  sent  the  best  eggs  to  the  British  market  a  few  years 
ago,  but  recently  the  Irish  Agricultural  Organization  Society 
began  to  give  lectures  and  instruct  classes  in  poultry  produc- 
tion, and  organized  co-operative  societies  for  the  marketing  of 
the  eggs.  The  resultant  improvement  in  the  freshness,  cleanli- 
ness, and  careful  packing  of  the  eggs  has  so  greatly  improved 
their  standing  in  the  markets  that  Irish  export  of  eggs  increased 
one-third  in  six  years,  1904  to  1910,  and  the  Irish  export  of 


310    SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

poultry  products  was  greater  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  than 
the  butter  export,  and  was  exceeded  in  value  only  by  the  export 
of  linen  and  cattle. 

Because  of  the  high  value  of  output  in  proportion  to  weight, 
it  should  be  emphasized  that  the  distribution  of  the  poultry 
industry  depends  more  on  man  and  markets  and  less  on  the  im- 
mediate environment  than  any  other  of  the  animal  industries 
thus  far  discussed.  It  should  also  be  noted  that  in  poultry 
farming  on  a  large  scale  the  failures  far  outnumber  the  successes, 
because  of  the  unusual  amount  of  detail  involved,  and  the  great 
difficulty  of  inspection. 

Turkeys,  ducks,  and  geese  comprise  about  six  per  cent,  of  the 
poultry  of  America,  but  despite  the  feathers  of  the  ducks  and 
geese,  these  birds,  because  of  their  small  number  of  eggs,  do 
not  contribute  the  double  source  of  income  furnished  by  the 
chicken.  In  Germany  the  tractable  goose  is  esteemed  as  is  the 
untractable  turkey  in  America,  and  it  is  common  to  see  boys 
herding  large  flocks  of  geese  at  pasture. 

The  supply  of  eggs  and  poultry,  particularly  eggs,  may  be 
multiplied  almost  as  many  times  as  we  may  desire.  It  is  pos- 
sible to  let  poultry  replace  to  a  very  great  extent  a  large  pro- 
portion of  the  other  animal  industries  outside  of  dairying,  as 
has  been  the  case  in  China,  where  it  has  also  partly  replaced 
dairying.  At  the  present  time  the  egg  industry  of  the  United 
States  is  in  a  chaotic,  unorganized,  inefficient,  wasteful  condi- 
tion in  comparison  with  that  of  Ireland,  Denmark,  or  even  Rus- 
sia in  1913.  The  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture  esti- 
mates that  we  were  losing  $50,000,000  a  year  through  needless 
breakage,  "unnecessary  addling,  spoiling,  and  deterioration  of 
good  eggs  from  bad  handling  on  the  farm,  on  the  way  from  the 
farm  to  town,  in  town,  in  transit  from  town  to  city,  in  all  stages 
in  the  progress  from  the  car  to  the  breakfast  table."  We  have 
neglected  our  eggs  because  they  were  an  unimportant  by-product 
not  worthy  the  attention  devoted  to  a  larger  crop.  If  necessity 
arises,  we  shall,  of  course,  organize  our  markets  so  that  the  eggs 
will  reach  the  consumer  promptly  and  in  good  condition  rather 
than  slowly  and  in  bad  condition.  In  the  American  egg  case, 
for  example,  there  is  much  breakage;  but  Russian  eggs  come 
to  the  British  market  with  almost  no  breakage  in  wooden  cases, 


HEREDITY  AND  PRODUCTION  OF  HENS         811 

6  feet  long,  2  feet  wide,  and  15  inches  thick,  in  which  1,440 
eggs  are  packed  solidly  in  wooden  wool ;  that  is,  fine  shavings. 

Another  way  of  increasing  the  future  egg  supply  is  the  keep- 
ing of  better  fowls.  In  the  matter  of  breeding,  chickens  are 
almost  like  clay  in  the  hands  of  the  potter.  They  have  been 
bred  so  long  that  their  form  has  become  pliable.  Chicken 
fanciers  can  vary  breeds  almost  at  will.  We  have  in  this  coun- 
try 104  standard  breeds  and  a  large  number  of  non-standard. 
Some  are  large,  some  smaller  than  your  fist.  They  are  of  all 
colors.  Some  will  scratch  up  the  yard,  fly  over  the  house  and 
hunt  their  living  like  wild  animals,  others  sit  around  like  statues, 
waiting  to  be  fed  with  a  spoon.  Some  are  good  mothers,  others 
have  become  so  perverted  by  selection  that  they  will  not  rear 
their  own  young,  but  will  lay  eggs  furiously  at  most  unnatural 
speed. 

Poultry  raising,  and  especially  egg  production,  responds  read- 
ily to  the  fostering  care  of  governmental  or  other  outside  aid. 
The  application  of  the  laws  of  animal  breeding  cause  large  in- 
crease in  the  average  egg  output,  as  various  agricultural  experi- 
ment stations  have  shown.  It  is  estimated  that  the  average 
American  hen  lays  seventy  eggs  per  year;  but  in  the  Philadel- 
phia North  American  annual  egg-laying  contest  the  winning 
hen  of  1912  laid  256  eggs,  and  in  the  next  three  years  the  num- 
ber rose  to  282,  286,  and  314.  Flocks  of  hens  laying  over  200 
eggs  per  year  are  not  uncommon  at  the  present  time.  Here  is 
a  substantial  possibility  of  increasing  the  supply  of  this  very 
good  and  very  important  article  of  food. 

In  speed  of  reproduction,  the  hen  is  almost  as  far  ahead  of 
the  pig  as  the  pig  is  ahead  of  the  sheep  or  the  cow.  The  hen 
(a  good  one)  may  lay  seventy-five  to  eighty-five  eggs  in  March, 
April,  and  May,  of  which  nine-tenths  will  be  hatched  by  the 
heat  of  an  oil  lamp  and  reared  wholesale  in  artificially  heated 
boxes  called  brooders,  while  the  hen  continues  her  egg-laying 
business.  An  appeal  was  printed  on  June  2,  1917,  for  more 
food  production,  including  the  setting  of  an  extra  hen.  At 
Christmas  time  the  author  of  the  appeal  had  roast  chicken  from 
one  of  these  surplus  broods,  started  after  the  appeal  was  printed. 
It  was  one  of  eleven  raised  by  one  hen  after  the  main  laying 
season  was  over. 


312     SWINE,  POULTRY,  AND  SMALL  ANIMALS  SUPPLY 

BABBITS,    HARES,    OTHER  SMALL   ANIMALS,    AND   OSTRICHES 

The  rearing  of  rabbits  and  hares  is,  in  its  economic  aspects, 
like  the  poultry  industry.  In  1917  the  French  peasants  got 
a  cock  and  two  hens  and  a  pair  of  rabbits  as  part  of  the  equip- 
ment given  by  the  American  and  English  Quakers  working  with 
the  Red  Cross  in  the  reconstruction  service  in  areas  devastated 
by  the  Germans.  Hares  have  the  advantage  of  being  able  to 
thrive  in  closer  confinement  than  poultry.  The  mother  hare 
will  raise  several  fine  families  a  year  in  a  box  a  few  feet  square. 
And  they  will  feed  on  a  very  wide  range  of  vegetable  food — 
weeds  as  well  as  hay  and  grains.  They  are  quite  generally  kept 
by  the  small  farmers  of  northern  France  and  Belgium,  whence 
they  have  for  years  been  exported  to  England  by  the  hundreds 
of  tons.  The  total  British  import  of  rabbits  amounted  to  over 
$5,000,000  per  year  before  the  outbreak  of  the  war. 

The  high  price  of  meat  has  caused  the  rabbit  of  Australia, 
which  has  long  been  a  great  pest,  suddenly  to  become  of  great 
value.  In  that  land  there  are  no  wild  dogs  or  foxes,  and  rab- 
bits, which,  produce  three  or  four  litters  of  young  per  year, 
multiplied  in  the  genial  and  almost  winterless  climate  until  in 
places  the  pasture  would  no  longer  support  any  other  animals. 
Thus  the  sheep  industry  has  had  to  fight  for  its  life  against  this 
nimble-burrowing,  fur-bearing  grass-eater.  The  people  of  Aus- 
tralia have  built  wire  fences,  hundreds  of  miles  long:  they  have 
poisoned  and  shot  and  hunted  rabbits  by  all  means  in  their 
power,  and  still  bunny  has  thriven,  devastating  large  areas  of 
good  grass.  But  a  new  enemy  has  appeared,  one  of  the  great 
forces  on  this  earth — an  economic  force.  The  high  price  of  meat 
has  changed  the  aspect  of  the  rabbit  situation.  Suddenly  rabbits 
became  worth  catching  to  sell.  In  1917  a  special  commissioner 
in  New  South  Wales  said  they  were  worth  $5,000,000  a  year. 
Frozen  rabbit  is  now  regularly  exported  to  Europe  whenever 
the  shipping  permits.  In  August,  1918,  the  British  Board  of 
Trade  ordered  600,000  crates  of  skinned  rabbits,  21,000,000  rab- 
bits, 36,000,000  pounds,  with  felt  from  their  fur  for  hat-making 
as  a  by-product. 

In  ostrich  farming  we  have  an  example  of  a  new  domestic 
animal  and  a  new  industry,  which,  like  the  sheep  industry,  may 


THE  NEWLY  DOMESTICATED  OSTRICH  313 

yield  a  double  product,  including  meat.  This  bird  is  a  native 
of  semi-arid  Africa,  being  found  over  most  of  the  Sudan  and 
large  areas  in  South  Africa.  The  Hamar  Arabs  in  West  Kor 
dofan,  Sudan,  keep  a  few  birds  in  pens,  but  the  feathers  are 
inferior  to  those  from  wild  birds,  which  were  until  recently  the 
sole  supply  in  all  lands.  The  British  in  South  Africa  are  the 
real  founders  of  the  ostrich  industry,  having  found  that  when 
inclosed  by  a  strong  fence  and  supplied  with  suitable  food  of 
grain  and  good  grass  the  ostrich  will  thrive  about  as  well  in 
domestication  as  the  sheep.  In  forty  years  the  Afrikanders  have 
reduced  ostrich  farming  to  a  science,  established  systems  of  reg- 
istry for  pure-bred  birds  and  improved  them  to  the  point  where 
$5,000  has  been  paid  for  a  single  bird  for  breeding  purposes. 
The  number  of  tame  birds  in  the  fields  of  Cape  Colony  farmers 
was  estimated  at  500,000  in  1912,  the  best  feathers  sold  at  over 
$200  per  pound,  and  the  feather  export  of  $9,000,000  rivaled 
that  of  wool  even  though  the  colony  had  eighteen  million  sheep. 
In  one  irrigated  district  on  the  Grobbelaars  River,  two  miles  by 
seventy,  80,000  ostriches  were  kept  at  pasture  on  alfalfa.  They 
yielded  over  $20  apiece  per  year,  and  the  land  sold  for  $750 
to  $1,000  per  acre.  A  change  in  styles  might  permanently 
change  all  this,  as  the  war  has  already  temporarily  done.  There 
is  little  reason  other  than  custom  why  the  feather-yielding  ostrich 
should  not  eventually  become  in  some  form  an  article  of  our 
food  supply,  like  the  milk-giving  cow,  the  wool-yielding  sheep, 
or  the  laboring  ox.* 

*  We  may  add  other  animals  to  our  domesticated  and  edible  list,  as 
meat  scarcity  increases  and  prejudice  decreases.  Fur  farming  offers  some 
interesting  possibilities  here.  The  Canadian  fur  hunter  eats  on  occasion 
every  animal  that  he  skins. 

"Do  not  forget  to  include  musquash  (muskrat)  among  your  foods, 
sold  as  '  marsh  rabbit '  in  the  markets  of  Washington,  Philadelphia,  and 
Baltimore.  Thousands  of  tons  of  this  delicious  meat  arc  thrown  away 
by  the  trappers  every  year  because  somebody  called  it  'rat'  and  then 
people  refused  to  eat  anything  which  anybody  had  given  the  name  of 
rat."— Robert  T.  Morris— letter  of  3/27/19. 


CHAPTER  XIV 
EDIBLE  FATS 

THE  war  has  taught  us  that  we  cannot  get  along  without  some 
fat  in  our  food.  We  knew  less  about  fat  before  the  war,  because 
every  one  had  a  chance  to  get  it,  and  physiologists  thought  that 
starch  like  that  of  the  potato,  which  is  easily  converted  into  fat, 
would  meet  all  our  needs.  We  have  found,  however,  that  we 
need  some  little  round  globules  of  fat  taken  directly  into  our 
systems.  Without  it,  man's  food  digests  so  quickly  that  his 
stomach  becomes  empty  and  he  has  a  continual  sense  of  hunger 
and  loses  weight.  Fat  was  the  food  element  of  which  Germany 
had  the  greatest  shortage,  and  it  is  generally  reported  that  the 
average  adult  had  lost  fifteen  pounds  of  weight  before  the  war 
had  been  going  on  for  three  years. 

Fat  is  a  kind  of  safety  bank  for  our  bodies.  If  our  stomach 
gets  a  little  surplus  food,  it  makes  a  few  globules  of  fat  which 
our  blood  tucks  away  into  some  part  of  our  framework,  to  be 
used  later  in  some  time  of  need,  as  is  the  case  with  the  camel 
and  other  fat-storing  animals. 

Besides  its  great  value  as  food,  fat  is  very  necessary  in  cooking. 
Without  it  we  could  not  fry  at  all.  Baking  bread  would  be  dif- 
ficult and  many  other  embarrassments  woul'd  beset  the  greaseless 
cook.  Boiling  is  the  chief  refuge,  and  boiled  food  is  very  taste- 
less and  monotonous.  Furthermore,  fat  is  one  of  the  important 
elements  of  seasoning,  as  the  butter  on  potatoes  or  beans,  or 
the  savory  flavor  of  lard  or  fat  pork  in  fried  potatoes,  demon- 
strates. 

Man  gets  his  food  fat  from  a  great  variety  of  sources,  depend- 
ing on  the  climate  and  therefore  the  natural  products  of  his 
country  as  well  as  upon  his  wealth,  or  what  he  can  afford  to  buy. 
In  some  places  it  is  butter,  in  others  lard,  fat  pork,  goose  grease, 
olive  oil,  cottonseed  oil,  coconut  oil,  oleomargarine,  ghee,  or  beef 
tallow,  which  is  carried  in  shiploads  from  the  semi-arid  regions 

314 


THE  KINDS  OF  EDIBLE  FAT  315 

of  Africa  opposite  Arabia,  over  into  India  to  add  flavoring  and 
fat  to  the  rice  and  other  cereal  food  of  the  peoples  of  Hindustan. 

Edible  fats  may  be  divided  into  three  grades,  according  to  cost : 
1,  butter;  2,  animal  body  fats;  3,  vegetable  fats.  It  was  shown  in 
the  last  chapter  how  fat  pork  is  in  many  parts  of  the  United 
States  the  substitute  for  butter,  but  even  this  is  too  costly  for  the 
people  of  many  parts  of  the  world,  and  we  have  a  great  increase 
in  the  use  of  beef  suet  (body  fat)  as  a  substitute  for  butter,  lard, 
and  pork.* 

There  has  been  a  long  legislative  fight  (for  profits)  between 
the  dairymen  and  the  people  who  wish  to  make  oleomargarine 
look  like  butter,  sell  as  butter,  and  replace  it.  Properly  colored 
and  slightly  mixed  with  butter,  oleomargarine  is  so  much  like 
butter  that  it  will  pass  undetected  in  nearly  all  cases.  As  tallow 
costs  much  less  than  butter,  there  is  plainly  an  unfair  profit  in 
selling  the  margarine  as  butter,  but  its  use  has  nevertheless  been 
steadily  increasing  for  many  years,  and  will  surely  continue. 

Dr.  Graham  Lusk  in  Food  in  War  Time,  p.  15,  says: 

The  legal  restrictions  placed  upon  the  sale  of  oleomargarine  and  the 
taxes  enhancing  its  cost,  now  in  operation  in  many  of  our  states,  are 
without  warrant  in  morals  or  common  sense  and  should  be  entirely 
abolished  in  times  like  these.  A  well-made  brand  of  oleomargarine  is 
much  more  palatable  than  butter  of  the  second  grade,  and  certainly 
for  cooking  purposes  is  just  as  valuable. 

The  war  has  made  us  drop  many  of  our  food  prejudices,  so 
that  margarine  is  now  in  a  position  of  much  greater  importance 
than  ever  before.  In  Canada,  a  land  where  cities  are  few,  and 
the  dairy  interests  are  strong  in  politics,  the  manufacture  of 
oleomargarine  had  been  absolutely  prohibited  until,  late  in  the 
war,  the  need  of  it  in  Britain  caused  it  to  be  manufactured  for 
export  to  the  mother  country.  In  Great  Britain  75,000  tons 
were  imported  in  1913,  130,000  in  1917.  By  the  end  of  that  year 

* "  West  Point  Academy  has  been  buying  840  pounds  of  lard  and  450 
pounds  of  butterine  per  month.  Both  were  discontinued  and  their  place 
taken  by  drippings  from  the  fatty  portions  of  meat  carcasses,  which  yield 
about  2,500  pounds  of  fine  grease  used  in  the  making  of  pie  crust,  French 
fried  potatoes,  etc.  After  this  grease  has  served  its  purpose,  it  is  shipped 
to  New  York,  where  the  clear  grease  brought  thirteen  and  a  half  cents  per 
pound,  and  by-products  in  the  way  of  scrap,  four  and  a  half  cents.  During 
January,  1018,  the  Academy  realized  $616  from  the  sale  of  once-used 
grease."— United  States  Official  Bulletin,  February  J8  1918. 


S16  EDIBLE  FATS 

the  British  output  was  5,000  tons  a  week.  It  is  part  of  the 
established  ration,  four  ounces  per  person  per  week  being  al- 
lowed. It  has  long  been  manufactured  in  Holland,  and  by  1917 
the  butter  production  of  70,000  tons,  amounting  to  twenty-five 
pounds  per  capita,  was  exceeded  by  the  margarine  output  of 
180,000  tons,  or  sixty-six  pounds  per  capita.  This  condition  was 
probably  temporary,  due  to  the  slaughter  of  cattle  that  could  no 
longer  get  imported  feed. 

Despite  her  great  export  of  butter,  Denmark  has  also  been  an 
important  producer,  importer,  and  user  of  margarine,  because  it 
was  cheaper. 

In  1915  the  Danes  began  to  make  margarine  from  hardened 
whale  oil  which  is  said  to  compare  favorably  with  hog  lard. 
Norway  has  also  taken  up  this  industry,  which  has  doubtless 
come  to  stay. 

Competition  between  different  sources  of  supply  has  been  going 
on  for  a  long  while,  and  is  getting  keener.  Not  only  has  there 
been  competition  between  butter  fat  and  body  fat,  but  also 
between  animal  fat  and  vegetable  fat. 


VEGETABLE  FATS 

THE   OLIVE 

The  Mediterranean  climate  with  its  dry  summer  is  a  poor 
place  for  dairy  products  of  any  sort.  Its  pasture  is  scanty  and 
its  animals  tend  to  be  few,  but  fortunately  this  climate  fur- 
nishes a  partial  substitute  for  butter  fat  in  the  fat  of  olive  oil, 
which  is  chemically  almost  exactly  like  the  fat  of  butter  and 
replaces  it  and  lard  in  the  diet  of  the  people  of  southern  France, 
Italy,  Asia  Minor,  and  north  Africa.  It  is  said  that  every 
Spaniard  eats  from  twenty  to  twenty-five  pounds  of  olive  oil 
per  year,  although  the  olive  tree  grows  on  only  half  the  area 
of  the  kingdom.  The  Portuguese  produced  about  fourteen  pounds 
per  capita  in  1910.  In  1911,  a  year  of  unusual  yield,  the  Greek 
oil  output  of  twenty-five  to  thirty  million  gallons  amounted  to 
eighty  or  ninety  pounds  per  capita.  Many  restaurants  in  Amer- 
ican cities,  run  by  people  from  the  Mediterranean  Basin,  serve 
good  meals,  in  which  olive  oil  entirely  replaces  butter. 


THE  OLIVE  AND  THE  COW  317 

America  has  a  territory  where  the  olive  tree  and  the  cow  com- 
pete. People  from  the  eastern  part  of  the  United  States,  accus- 
tomed to  an  abundant  supply  of  milk,  have  moved  to  southern 
California  where  the  Mediterranean  climate  makes  butter  pro- 
duction more  costly  than  in  the  old  home  with  its  moderate  rain- 
fall. The  milk  is  expensive  to  produce  and  much  butter  was 
brought  from  the  Mississippi  Valley  until  a  few  years  ago,  when 
dairying  in  the  damper  sections  of  the  Pacific  States  made  them 
independent  of  Eastern  butter.  Readjustment  of  consumption  to 
geographic  conditions  is  coming  through  the  discovery  that  the 
olive  will  grow  in  that  dry  region,  and  the  manufacture  and  use 
of  olive  oil,  the  natural  product  of  that  climate,  is  increasing. 

The  olive-growing  area  in  southwestern  United  States  and 
Mexico,  in  North  Africa,  South  Africa,  and  in  other  parts  of  the 
warm  temperate  zones  can  be  greatly  extended.  The  production 
of  olive  oil  has,  however,  been  held  down  by  the  appearance  of 
yet  cheaper  rivals,  just  as  the  appearance  of  margarine  has  held 
down  the  production  of  butter. 

COTTONSEED   OIL, 

A  few  decades  ago  cotton  seed  was  thrown  out  in  piles  to  rot 
— a  waste  product.  Sometimes  it  was  burned,  and  was  then  put 
back  on  the  fields  for  fertilizer;  but  now  we  are  getting  from  it 
more  than  $100,000,000  worth  of  edible  oil  a  year.  In  the  eleven 
months  ending  June  30, 1918,  the  total  product  was  1,300,000,000 
pounds,  or  nearly  thirteen  pounds  for  every  person  in  the  United 
States.  At  least  a  third  of  it  was  eaten  as  lard  substitute.  It 
is  mixed  with  beef  suet,  which  is  margarine,  and  the  joint  prod- 
uct is  called  oleomargarine,  a  well-known  butter  substitute. 
Even  before  the  war,  the  United  States  consul  at  Stavanger, 
Norway,  said  that  nine-tenths  of  the  population  ate  oleomar- 
garine instead  of  butter.  We  can  easily  see  why  people  not  over- 
rich  should  do  this,  for  butter  at  that  time  cost  thirty-five  cents 
a  pound,  and  the  cottonseed  oil  for  the  margarine  cost  seven  and 
one-half  cents  a  pound.  The  import  was  rapidly  increasing. 

Cottonseed  oil  *   is  a  substitute  both   for  butter,  lard,  and 

*  Cotton  almost  merits  a  place  by  itself  in  a  book  on  food,  BO  important 
is  the  seed,  of  which  the  world  uses  annually  about  11,000,000  tons,  pro- 


318  EDIBLE  FATS 

tallow,  and  for  olive  oil,  with  which  it  is  often  mixed.  Very 
few  people  can  detect  by  taste  the  difference  between  the  pure 
and  the  mixed  olive  oil,  unless  it  has  been  allowed  to  get  old, 
when  cottonseed  oil,  but  not  the  olive  oil,  becomes  rancid.  Olive 
oil  can  stay  in  an  open  tub  in  a  hot  climate  for  two  years  and 
still  be  good,  sweet  oil,  whereas  the  cottonseed  oil  becomes  cloudy 
and  rancid  in  a  mucli  shorter  time,  and  butter  is  even  more 
quickly  spoiled. 

It  was  pointed  out  in  a  previous  chapter  that  the  warm  lands 
have  not  used  their  great  possibilities  for  developing  the  dairy 
industry,  but  these  lands,  more  than  any  others,  have  increased 
the  supply  of  edible  vegetable  fats  or  oils  in  the  last  fifteen  years. 
Cottonseed  oil  is  but  an  example. 

THE   COCONUT 

Even  more  promising  rivals  of  dairy  products  are  the  oily 
coconut  and  the  nutritious  peanut.  These  two  little-used  plant 
products  have  recently  made  a  late  start  on  a  career  of  useful- 
ness very  suggestive  of  great  changes  to  come  in  food  supply  and 
production. 

Nearly  half  of  the  meat  of  the  coconut  is  fat  or  oil,  and  the  nut 
has  the  quality,  rather  unusual  among  oily  vegetables,  of  keeping 
for  many  months  without  becoming  rancid.  The  recent  rise  in 
the  price  of  animals,  causing  the  price  of  lard  to  be  nearly 
doubled  in  a  few  years  before  the  war,  made  its  substitute, 

ducing  350,000,000  gallons  of  oil,  most  of  which  is  eaten.  The  food  service 
of  this  remarkable  textile  plant  is  not  confined  to  the  oil.  From  fifteen  to 
thirty-five  per  cent,  of  the  seed  is  oil,  and  the  rest  as  it  comes  from  the 
pre83  is  a  hard  cake  easily  ground  into  a  brownish  meal  which  still  con- 
tains a  considerable  quantity  of  fat,  and  three  times  as  much  protein  as 
white  flour.  It  has  for  the  last  twenty-five  years  been  the  cheapest  source 
of  protein  for  dairy  cattle.  It  has  been  widely  exported,  especially  to 
northwestern  Europe.  Its  price  has  been  steadily  rising  until  in  1918  it 
was  more  than  sixty  dollars  a  ton.  It  may  become  a  very  important  part 
of  our  bread  supply  if  we  continue  to  rationalize  our  eating.  In  the 
spring  of  1918  a  bakery  in  Charlotte,  North  Carolina,  was  turning  out 
400  loaves  of  cottonseed  bread  weekly.  It  is  rather  dark  in  color,  but  has 
twice  as  much  protein  as  lean  beef.  The  value  of  adding  such  a  meat 
substitute  to  bread  itself  can  easily  be  appreciated.  Up  to  the  present  we 
have  made  no  serious  attempt  to  produce  cotton  seed,  except  as  a  by-product 
of  cotton.  The  time  may  come  when  we  will  deliberately  try  to  produce 
strains  of  cotton  that  produce  more  and  richer  seeds,  and  as  cotton  grows 
on  more  than  700,000  square  miles  of  the  United  States,  it  is  a  promising 
source  of  both  fat  and  protein. 


AN  IMPORTANT  NEW  FOOD 


319 


cottonseed  oil,  advance  in  price,  and  hence  caused  increased 
attention  to  be  given  to  the  coconut  as  a  source  of  food  fat.  It 
has  long  been  used  as  a  soap  fat,  and  for  some  other  industrial 
purposes,  but  it  has  a  rather  strong  taste  not  relished  by  many 
people.  Then  some  chemist  per- 
formed a  miracle.  By  an  easy 
process,  he  managed  to  work  one 
atom  of  hydrogen  into  the  oil 
molecule  and  it  became  a  rela- 
tively hard  white  substance, 
without  disagreeable  flavor ;  and 
the  world  received  another  edi- 
ble fat  easily  produced  and  with 
enormous  possibilities  of  in- 
creased output.  It  was  the  lack 
of  their  usual  supply  of  coconut 
fat  more  than  any  other  one 
thing  that  caused  the  Germans 
to  grow  thin  and  to  feel  the  con- 
tinuous pangs  of  hunger  from 
harvest  season  to  harvest  season. 
Before  the  war  commerce  in  and 
the  use  of  coconut  oil  was  in- 
creasing with  great  rapidity  in 
Europe. 

A  firm  in  Mannheim,  Ger- 
many, had  put  upon  the  market 
"Palmona,"  a  hard  snow-white 
vegetable  cooking  fat  made  from 
copra  (dried  coconut  meats)  and  practically  one  hundred  per 
cent,  pure  fat.  None  of  the  rival  animal  fats  (margarine,  butter, 
lard,  goose  grease,  etc.)  contains  less  than  seven  to  ten  per  cent, 
of  water.  An  American  consul  said  in  1910:  "The  product  has 
found  such  favor  that  the  manufacture  can  scarcely  keep  up  with 
the  demand"  and  the  output  of  the  Mannheim  factory  increased 
in  a  few  years  from  700,000  to  over  21,000,000  pounds  per  year. 
To  make  the  substance  spread  like  table  butter,  small  quantities 
°f  egg-yolk  and  butter  are  introduced;  the  resultant  product  is 
called  "Palmona." 


FIG  104 — Coconut  palm  is 
one  of  the  groat  automatic  food 
machines  There  is  a  saying  in 
the  tropics  that  when  a  man  gets 
his  coconut  grove  started  he 
hangs  up  his  hammock.  (U.  S. 
Dept  Agr.) 


320 


EDIBLE  FATS 


In  Austria,  Holland,  and  England  the  same  substitution  has 
found  favor.  Coconuts  were  imported  through  Hamburg  and 
taken  in  boatloads  up  the  Elbe  to  Bohemia,  where  the  oil  was 
pressed  out  and  mixed  with  a  small  proportion  of  egg-yolk  and 
cream  and  sold  for  fourteen  cents  per  pound  in  competition  with 
butter  at  from  thirty-one  cents  to  forty-one  cents  per  pound.  It 
is  difficult  to  estimate  the  importance  of  this  food  supply  to  a 
population  whose  adult  laborers  received  from  forty  to  seventy- 


FIG.  105. — Opening  coconuls  for  drying  to  mako  eopra.     Philippine  Islands. 
(Bureau  of  Insular  Affairs.) 

five  cents  per  day.  The  output  of  European  margarine  factories 
using  coconut  oil  as  a  base  was  estimated  at  sixteen  million 
pounds  per  week  in  1912,  an  amount  exceeding  the  total  Euro- 
pean import  of  butter.  Consequently  the  market  price  of  coco- 
nut oil  had  increased  enormously  and  the  world  was  being 
searched  for  additional  supplies  of  coconuts.  The  world  will 
have  little  difficulty  in  finding  the  coconuts  if  it  will  wait  a  few 
years  for  the  trees  to  grow.  The  supply  can  be  increased  much 
more  easily  than  the  supply  of  butter,  because  large  areas  of 
unused  land  on  nearly  all  tropic  continents  and  islands  are 


THE  WONDERFUL  COCONUT  PALM  321 

suited  to  the  coconut  palm.  It  is  easy  to  acquire  a  product  that 
falls  from  the  tree,  virtually  a  wild  tree  at  that,  and  lies  for 
weeks  safe  and  sweet,  embedded  in  its  thick  cushion  of  husk 
waiting  to  be  picked  up.  The  food  possibilities  of  the  production 
of  the  coconut  sound  almost  too  good  to  be  true.  Where  there  is 
even  a  moderate  rainfall,  the  tree  grows  on  a  great  variety  of 
soils,  upon  the  shores  of  almost  all  tropic  seas.  Perhaps  it  is 
most  important  in  the  South  Sea  Islands,  many  of  which  are 
only  coral  reefs,  with  a  little  limestone  soil,  bearing  groves  of 
coconut  trees  which  nature  long  since  planted  on  them  by  casting 
up  floating  nuts. 

The  cottonseed  oil  plants  of  Texas  and  other  Southern 
States  are  now  being  used  to  some  extent  for  the  produc- 
tion of  coconut  oil.  It  is  compressed  from  the  dried  meats  of 
the  nut,  which  is  imported  from  the  South  Sea  Islands.  As 
a  result,  we  are  told  by  The  Manufacturers'  Record  Ameri- 
can capital  will  doubtless  be  invested  in  coconut  plantations  on 
these  islands  and  closer  trade  relations  with  them  will  be  estab- 
lished. Copra  may  then  become  one  of  our  chief  imports.  This 
product  is  now  to  be  found  on  our  own  markets.  The  raising  of 
coconuts  and  their  preparation  for  exportation  are  interestingly 
described  as  follows : 


Of  the  many  romantic  flavors  that  enter  into  the  life  of  the  people 
of  the  different  island  groups  lying  adjacent  to  the  equator  in  the 
Pacific  Ocean,  none  is  more  pronounced  than  that  which  is  attached  to 
the  coconut-growing  industry.  It  is  these  stately  palms  that  lend  dis- 
tinction and  attractiveness  to  the  islands.  To  the  growing  of  coconuts 
is  largely  due  the  advancement  of  civilization  in  many  of  those  remote 
islands.  As  an  evidence  of  this  fact  it  may  be  cited  that  one  British 
concern  owns  a  coconut  plantation  of  100,000  acres  in  the  Solomon 
Islands  and  that  the  very  borders  of  this  plantation  are  inhabited  by 
natives  who  still  practise  cannibalism. 

It  is  the  ambition  of  practically  every  man  who  has  lived  even  for  a 
brief  time  under  the  tropical  skies  of  the  South  Seas  to  own  a  coconut 
plantation.  When  once  established,  the  industry  insures  a  lifetime  of 
profit  and  ease  for  the  grower  of  the  product.  The  trees  require 
practically  no  attention  from  the  time  their  growth  begins  until  the 
deadening  commences,  nearly  one  hundred  years  thereafter.  The  bear- 
ing period  of  the  coconut  tree  is  seventy  to  eighty  years.  The  first  coco- 
nuts may  be  expected  in  about  six  years  after  the  original  planting. 
The  tree  comes  into  full  bearing  about  the  twelfth  year  and  from  then 


3£2  EDIBLE  FATS 

on  until  its  fife  is  ended  it  gives  an  average  annual  yield  of  about 
fifty  nuts.  The  average  yield  of  copra  per  acre  is  about  one-third  of  a 
ton.  It  was  aalKiig  at  the  beginning  of  the  war  for  about  $150  a  ton 
in  the  London  market.  The  price  has  advanced  considerably  since  then, 
it  is  stated.  The  cost  of  operating  a  plantation  of  coconuts  is  exceed- 
ingly smalL  All  of  the  labor  is  performed  by  island  natives,  and  the 
ordinary  expenses  of  gathering,  cutting,  and  drying  the  crop  of  nuts  do 
not  exceed  $50  for  each  one  hundred  acres.  This  cost  is  much  more 
than  offset  upon  many  of  the  plantations  by  the  utilization  of  the  land 
also  for  the  grazing  of  cattle  and  sheep. 

The  preparation  of  the  copra  for  market  is  very  simple.  The  nuts 
are  allowed  to  fall  naturally,  and  at  intervals  of  once  a  month,  and 
sometimes  not  oftener  than  once  every  two  months  the  nuts  are  col- 
lected into  piles  upon  the  ground.  The  laborers  then  split  the  nuts 
open  lengthwise  with  a  blow  from  an  ax.  The  kernels  are  removed 
with  two  or  three  dexterous  cuts  of  a  small  knife.  This  is  the  copra 
in  its  raw  state.  The  ordinary  daily  task  of  each  laborer  is  to  split  and 
clean  six  hundred  coconuts.  The  empty  shells  are  burned  upon  the 
ground,  the  ashes  from  them  being  regarded  as  good  fertifiier  for  the 
trees.  The  meat  of  the  nuts  is  placed  in  bags  and  conveyed  to  the 
platforms  for  drying.  The  drying  frames  vary  in  size  and  arrange- 
ment, but  the  principle  of  their  construction  is  always  the  same.  The 
kernels  are  exposed  to  the  sun  in  shallow  layers  on  trays,  and  pro- 
tection is  provided  from  the  showers  and  from  the  heavy  dews  at 
night.  On  the  burger  estates  the  trays  are  arranged  to  run  on  rails 
from  under  a  roof,  two  and  sometimes  three  or  more  trays  being  ar- 
ranged under  one  another,  thus  economizing  roofing  area.  The  bottoms 
of  the  trays  are  usually  constructed  of  reeds,  which  aOow  some  circu- 
lation of  air  through  the  kernels,  which  are  occasionally  stirred  during 
the  drying  process.  This  occupies  from  three  to  six  days,  depending 
on  the  cfimatic  conditions.  When  thoroughly  dry  the  finished  copra  is 
packed  into  bags  for  export. 

The  establishment  of  a  coconut  plantation,  we  are  told,  is  an 
interesting-  process.  Nuts  are  carefully  selected,  placed  in  piles, 
and  exposed  to  moisture ;  when  the  sprouts  are  three  or  four  feet 
long,  the  nuts  are  placed  in  holes  in  the  ground,  generally  about 
thirty  feet  apart.  The  cost  of  planting  varies  according  to  local 
conditions.  Ordinarily,  it  will  run  close  to  $100  per  acre,  in- 
cluding clearing  the  land  of  underbrush  and  keeping  it  dear 
until  the  trees  arrive  at  the  producing  stage.  It  also  includes 
the  cost  price  of  the  wild  land,  which  ranges  from  $1  to  $5  per 
acre. 

To  quote  further  from  The  Manufacturers'  Record: 


THE  NATIVE  USES  OF  THE  COCONUT  323 

To  the  native  of  these  islands  it  may  be  said  to  provide  all  the  neces- 
saries of  life — food,  shelter,  and  clothing.  The  full-grown  tree  attains 
a  height  of  fully  ninety  feet,  and  the  timber  may  be  used  as  logs  for 
bridging  streams  and  for  house-building.  The  trunk  of  a  tree  may  be 
split  into  lengths  which  bend  readily,  and  in  this  form  the  timbers 
serve  useful  purposes  in  house  construction.  The  plaited  leaves  are 
used  for  thatching  the  roofs  and  for  making  the  outer  covering  of  the 
walls.  They  are  made  into  beds  to  sleep  on,  into  mats  for  the  floor, 
and  they  serve  for  plates  to  eat  from.  Beautiful  baskets  and  fans  are 
made  of  the  leaves.  The  flesh  of  the  nut  forms  an  excellent  and  nourish- 
ing food;  it  produces  oil  for  cooking,  for  mixing  native  puddings,  for 
lighting  the  house,  and  anointing  the  body.  The  milk,  especially  that 
from  the  young  nut,  forms  a  palatable  and  refreshing  drink.  An  indus- 
try of  no  little  importance  among  the  natives  of  the  different  islands 
is  the  manufacture  of  twine,  known  as  sennet,  from  the  husk  of  the 
nuts.  This  material  is  used  chiefly  to  tie  the  timbers  together  in  con- 
struction of  native  houses,  no  nails  being  used  in  such  work.  Twine 
and  rope  of  any  size  up  to  towing  line  are  made  from  the  fiber.  The 
natives  are  adepts  in  weaving  fishing-nets  and  door-mats  of  the  fiber. 
The  "  cabbage,"  as  the  soft  central  part  of  the  head  of  the  coconut- 
palm  is  called,  can  be  made  into  a  delicious  salad.  It  is  not  the 
privilege,  however,  of  many  to  enjoy  this  delicacy,  as  few  persons  can 
afford  to  sacrifice  so  valuable  a  tree  for  such  a  purpose. 

Some  of  the  natives  of  the  South  Seas  make  what  is  called  coconut 
"  toddy  "  out  of  the  nuts.  The  liquor  is  intoxicating  to  a  high  degree, 
and  upon  most  plantations  its  manufacture  is  forbidden,  owing  to  the 
trouble  that  it  causes. 


In  Venezuela  the  people  live  very  largely  on  coconuts  and 
cassava — cassava,  as  stated  in  Chapter  VII,  being  the  substitute 
for  bread,  and  coconuts  the  substitute  for  butter. 

In  Trinidad  the  people  make  a  local  coconut  butter,  four  nuts 
with  their  seventy  per  cent,  of  fat  producing  a  pound.  The 
method  is  simple.  The  meat  is  grated,  and  the  oil  extracted  with 
boiling  water.  The  oil  rises  to  the  surface  of  the  water,  is 
skimmed  off,  and  allowed  to  stand  for  a  few  hours;  it  is  then 
churned,  making  a  white  fat  sometimes  almost  the  exact  dupli- 
cate of  our  cow's  product. 

For  years  steamers  have  made  regular  rounds  in  the  South 
Seas  bartering  for  nuts  and  taking  cargoes  of  them  to  Australian 
ports  for  the  crushing  of  the  oil.  Copra  is  taken  in  great  quan- 
tities to  Marseilles,  to  Hull,  England,  and  recently  to  the  cotton- 
mills  of  the  American  cotton-belt  for  grinding.  The  amount  of 


324  EDIBLE  FATS 

land  available  for  the  production  of  coconut  is  probably  one 
hundred  or  perhaps  even  a  thousand  times  the  area  at  present  so 
used.  On  the  west  coast  of  Costa  Rica,  for  example,  a  few 
months  ago  coconuts  were  worth  one  and  one-third  cents  each, 
a  price  so  low  that  people  did  not  think  it  worth  while  to  raise 
them. 

During  the  four  years,  1906-09,  the  Philippine  Islands  pro- 
duced eight  hundred  thousand  tons  of  copra ;  the  rapidly  increas- 
ing output  is  an  important  element  in  the  economic  life  of  the 
islands,  and  the  industry  gives  promise  of  becoming  yet  more 
important  there  and  elsewhere.  A  single  Liverpool  firm  recently 
invested  $5,000,000  in  west  African  coconut  plantations. 


THE  PEANUT 

The  peanut  may  be  considered  as  a  partner  of  the  coconut  in 
this  vegetable  onslaught  on  the  animal  industries — this  vegetable 
replacement  of  animal  scarcities.  While  the  coconut  is  a  sub- 
stitute for  butter  and  other  fats,  the  peanut  (see  its  content  in 
table  of  food  values)  is  a  substitute  not  only  for  butter  and 
other  fats,  but  also  for  cheese  and  meat.  Taken  together,  these 
two  nuts  form  an  admirable  example  of  the  substitution  of  plants 
for  animals  as  a  source  of  food  supply  (a  step  towards  the  easy 
support  of  larger  populations),  and  also  illustrate  the  transfer 
of  the  source  of  supply  from  cool  to  warmer  lands. 

The  peanut,  so  little  appreciated  in  the  past,  is  really  one  of 
the  most  valuable  of  foods.  It  is  nearly  as  nutritious  as  cheese, 
contains  per  pound  more  protein  than  a  pound  of  sirloin  steak, 
plus  more  carbohydrate  than  a  pound  of  potatoes,  plus  one-third 
as  much  fat  as  a  pound  of  butter — an  amazing  total.  Excluding 
shells  it  has  more  nourishment  per  pound  than  a  pound  of  sir- 
loin steak  added  to  a  pound  of  white  bread.  This  unusual  food 
cost  five  or  six  cents  per  pound  by  the  sack  before  the  war,  and 
keeps  without  deterioration  for  years — in  striking  contrast  to 
dairy  products  and  meat. 

Now  that  rising  prices  force  us  to  look  about  for  new  supplies, 
the  peanut  enters  into  our  diet  in  many  forms.  Since  it  fur- 
nishes both  protein  and  fat,  both  of  which  have  been  made  very 
scarce  by  the  war,  it  is  natural  that  it  should  spring  rapidly  into 


THE  GREAT  PROMISE  OF  THE  PEANUT    325 

importance.  Since  it  is  a  crop  that  we  use  directly  rather  than 
indirectly,  through  animals,  the  United  States  has  been  able  to 
increase  its  yield  more  than  that  of  any  other  crop.  In  1910 
the  acreage  in  the  United  States  was  800,000;  in  1916  it  was  esti- 
mated at  more  than  1,000,000,  and  in  1917  more  than  2,000,000 
— an  increase  without  a  parallel  in  American  agriculture,  per- 
haps in  the  world's  agriculture.  The  average  yield  per  acre  is 
about  thirty-four  bushels  of  peanuts  in  the  shell;  a  good  yield 
is  sixty  bushels,  with  a  ton  to  a  ton  and  a  half  of  good  hay.  A 
mill  can  produce  a  gallon  of  oil  from  a  bushel  of  peanuts  in  the 
shell.  An  acre  of  land  that  can  produce  20  bushels  of  wheat 
or  40  bushels  of  oats,  or  40  bushels  of  peanuts,  will  yield  154 
pounds  of  digestible  protein  in  the  form  of  wheat,  149  in  the 
form  of  oats,  or  186  in  the  form  of  peanuts.  It  will  yield  24 
pounds  of  fat  in  the  wheat,  61  pounds  in  the  oats,  and  300  pounds 
in  the  peanuts.  Truly,  the  peanut  is  a  food  of  promise.  Despite 
the  great  increase  in  production,  the  United  States  has  been 
steadily  importing  it  from  China  and  Japan  during  the  war. 
In  Europe  its  chief  use  is  in  the  form  of  edible  oil,  which  before 
the  war  sold  at  wholesale  for  eight  cents  per  pound — a  highly 
prized  substitute  for  lard,  butter,  and  olive  oil.  Marseilles,  long 
the  center  of  the  European  vegetable  oil  industry,  crushed 
240,000  tons  of  shelled  peanuts  in  1912,  along  with  120,000 
tons  of  peanuts  in  the  shell,  which  yielded  altogether  more  than 
15,000,000  gallons  of  edible  oil.  In  1916,  26,000,000  pounds  of 
oil  were  produced  in  the  United  States.  The  nut  also  is  coming 
into  dietary  use  in  various  forms.  The  United  States  Depart- 
ment of  Agriculture  has  recently  issued  a  special  leaflet  urging 
us  to  use  peanut  meal,  mixed  with  corn  meal  and  wheat  flour, 
for  griddle  cakes,  biscuits,  and  muffins;  to  eat  it  as  a  cereal;  to 
use  it  in  cakes,  cookies,  puddings,  and  in  soups ;  and  to  make  of 
it  a  meat  substitute.  Its  value  as  a  meat  substitute,  shown  in 
the  table  of  analyses,  may  be  proved  by  the  eating  of  a  few 
peanuts  at  the  end  of  a  meal  which  has  left  us  hungry  for  meat. 
The  fact  that  the  peanut  plant  is  at  home  from  latitude  37° 
north  to  the  south  temperate  zone  shows  its  wide  range 
of  soil  and  climate  and  the  great  possibilities  of  increased 
production,  as  compared  with  any  of  the  staples  thus  far 
discussed. 


326  EDIBLE  FATS 

It  has  long  been  an  important  money  crop  in  that  part  of  the 
sandy  Atlantic  plain  lying  near  the  Virginia-North  Carolina 
boundary.  It  is  grown  in  Argentina,  Brazil,  and  Costa  Rica. 
It  is  the  chief  export  of  the  French  and  English  colonies  of 
Senegal  and  Gambia  in  west  Africa,  and  is  also  exported  from 
Madagascar,  east  Africa,  India,  Japan,  and  China.  It  is  one  of 
the  few  articles  produced  and  exported  by  the  white,  black, 
yellow,  and  brown  races.  It  has  recently  been  cultivated  in  the 
semi-arid  districts  west  of  the  lower  Mississippi  Valley,  because 
of  its  ability  to  wait  long  for  rain  and  to  grow  whenever  the 
rain  comes.*  The  fact  that  it  can  be  harvested  by  the  pigs  adds 
to  its  importance.  The  export  of  peanuts  ($6,500,000)  from 
Madras  in  1910  was  more  valuable  than  the  wheat  exports  during 
the  same  year  from  any  port  in  the  United  States  except  New 
York. 

As  population,  land  values,  and  cost  of  living  steadily  rise  in 
the  cool  temperate  zone,  the  pressure  bears  most  heavily  on  the 
animal  products,  because  of  the  large  areas  of  land  required  by 
the  animals.  It  is  decidedly  comforting  to  find  good  substitutes 
in  the  palm  and  peanut,  which  very  nearly  furnish  diet  equiva- 
lents of  the  animal  products.  They  are  well  suited  to  the  vast 
areas  of  the  fruitful  tropics  and  to  cultivation  by  the  native 
populations  already  inhabiting  those  lands. 

These  two  plants  are  merely  members  of  a  class.  The  soy 
bean,  so  promising  in  American  agriculture,  contains  eighteen 
per  cent,  of  oil,  which  has  long  been  an  important  fat  food  for 
the  Japanese.  At  $1.50  per  bushel  of  beans  (the  American  price 
in  1912),  the  ten  pounds  of  oil  was  far  cheaper  than  butter.  In 
parts  of  North  Carolina  these  beans  were  being  regularly  grown 
two  or  three  years  ago  at  a  cost  of  seventy-five  cents  a  bushel. 
Rows  of  corn  were  planted  six  feet  apart,  with  rows  of  soy 
beans  planted  between  them  at  the  second  cultivation.  A  har- 
vester was  then  driven  astride  the  row  of  ripened  beans,  which 
were  gathered  and  thrashed  at  the  same  time,  at  a  cost  per 
bushel  not  exceeding  three-fourths  the  daily  wage  for  a  negro 
laborer.  This  method  of  production  can  be  practised  over  large 
areas,  extending  from  the  mouth  of  the  Chesapeake  to  the 

*  Compare  corn  in  this  respect  ( see  Chapter  III )  and  note  the  great 
importance  of  the  peanut  in  semi-arid  lands. 


THE  FAT  OF  THE  FUTURE  327 

mouth  of  the  Rio  Grande  and  from  the  Gulf  far  up  into  the  corn- 
belt.  The  bean,  being  a  legume,  enriches  the  land  and  im- 
proves the  corn  that  grows  beside  it.  The  oil  is  a  satisfactory 
edible  oil  with  a  history  perhaps  as  old  as  that  of  the  olive. 
It  has,  however,  only  recently  been  consumed  by  Europeans. 
In  1907  important  shipments  of  the  beans  were  made  from 
Manchuria  to  England  with  such  success  that  in  a  few  years 
the  amount  rose  to  a  million  tons.  In  Manchuria  beans  had 
been  grown  for  ages,  but  no  one  could  export  them  because 
of  the  rapacity  of  the  Chinese  governors,  who  in  that  region 
pursued  the  same  policy  as  the  Turks:  namely,  such  imposi- 
tion on  the  peasants  that  it  was  very  unwise  for  any  one  to 
have  more  of  a  crop  than  merely  enough  to  carry  him  through. 
If  he  had  more  the  governor  took  it;  therefore,  why  grow  it? 
The  Japanese  have  kept  order,  so  that  farmers  could  ship  what 
they  grew.  In  the  period  just  preceding  the  Great  War,  soy 
beans  were  sent  to  the  oil  works  of  Marseilles,  Antwerp,  Amster- 
dam, Hull,  and  Liverpool. 

THE   PROSPECTIVE   SUPPLY   OF   VEGETABLE   OILS 

The  sunflower  seed  has  thirty  to  fifty  per  cent,  of  edible  oil, 
used  to  some  extent  in  Hungary  and  Russia,  and  capable  of 
growing  over  large  areas  of  the  southern  part  of  the  United 
States  and  elsewhere.  Many  other  vegetable  oils  are  already  in 
use,  and  many  more  could  be  used  if  we  set  out  to  find  them. 
From  Nigeria  come  reports  of  vast  numbers  of  oily  nuts  of  the 
shea  tree  which  may  be  exported  by  thousands  of  tons  as  soon 
as  the  railways  open  up  new  districts.  A  native  working  by  the 
day  gathers  one  hundred  pounds  of  fruit,  yielding  fifty  pounds 
of  nuts,  making  with  European  machinery  seven  pounds  of  oil 
called  shea  butter.  This  is  prized  as  a  butter  material  by  the 
people  of  the  interior,  and,  like  the  palm  nut,  another  oil  pro- 
ducer, promises  quickly  to  enter  commerce.  In  Sierra  Leone, 
palm-nut  (not  coconut)  shipments  doubled  in  five  years  before 
the  war  and  furnished  two-thirds  of  the  total  export  of  $5,000,- 
000.  Of  palm  kernels  alone  the  United  Kingdom  succeeded  in 
importing  250,000  tons  in  the  year  of  ship  shortage,  1917.  At 
the  beginning  of  the  war  the  city  of  Hull  alone  was  crushing 


828  EDIBLE  FATS 

750,000  tons  of  oil  seeds,  chiefly  cottonseed,  linseed,  rape  seed, 
soy  bean,  sesame,  and  castor  bean.* 

The  fact  that  we  get  all  these  products  without  the  inter- 
vening beast  necessary  to  butter  and  cheese  is  of  great  impor- 
tance in  considering  the  food  possibilities.  These  substances  are 
valuable  both  on  account  of  ease  of  production  and  the  amount 
of  produce  left  for  man.  The  beasts  leave  us  a  small  residue. 
(See  table  on  page  182.)  The  probable  service  of  the  vegetable 
oils  to  the  food  supply  of  the  future  is  prophetically  shown  by 
our  recourse  to  them  in  the  emergency  of  the  war.  In  1914  we 
imported  58,000,000  pounds  of  coconut  oil ;  in  1917,  163,000,000. 
The  figures  for  copra  rose  from  60,000,000  to  367,000,000  pounds, 
more  than  six-fold  increase;  those  for  peanut  oil  rose  from 
7,000,000  to  27,000,000  pounds;  the  amount  of  soy-bean  oil  im- 
ported was  increased  more  than  twenty-fold,  from  13,000,000  to 
265,000,000  pounds.  It  is  very  suggestive  that  during  this 
period  a  factory  in  Wisconsin,  the  greatest  dairy  state  of  Amer- 
ica, started  to  manufacture  and  sell  throughout  the  United  States 
a  nut  butter  composed  of  sixty-five  to  seventy  per  cent,  of  coco- 
nut oil,  fifteen  per  cent,  peanut  oil,  two  and  one-half  per  cent, 
salt,  and  eleven  to  twelve  per  cent,  moisture.  It  is  undoubtedly 
easier  to  double,  triple,  or  quadruple  our  production  of  coconut 
and  peanut  oil  than  it  is  to  make  any  great  increase  in  the 
amount  of  butter. 

In  nearly  every  climate  some  vegetable  fats  are  produced — in 
the  wet  tropics,  the  palm  and  the  coconut ;  in  the  less  wet  tropics, 
the  peanut  and  the  coconut ;  in  the  warm  temperate  regions,  the 
peanut  and  the  bean ;  and  in  semi-arid  localities,  the  olive.  For 
a  fuller  discussion  of  the  olive,  see  Chapter  XXVII.  Vegetable 
oils  may  remove  the  need  of  a  warm-land  dairy  industry. 

*  Castor  oil  has  suddenly  become  important  as  a  lubricant  because  it 
will  stay  liquid  in  the  great  cold  of  high  aeroplane  flight.  Strange  to  say, 
this  oil  is  also  a  good  cooking  oil,  the  process  of  cooking  removing  from 
it  all  of  its  violent  physiological  effect. 


CHAPTER  XV 
THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

PISH  AND  PREJUDICE 

THE  Sea!  We  have  not  discovered  it  yet.  If  man  insists  on 
eating  animal  proteins  and  wants  a  twenty-fold  or  a  hundred- 
fold increase  in  the  supply,  I  call  his  attention  to  the  sea  as 
a  place  where  he  may  drop  his  prejudice  overboard,  investigate, 
and  probably  find  food  in  amounts  that  are  beyond  present 
computation. 

Would  you  eat  shark?  Most  likely  not,  according  to  your  first 
impulse,  yet  the  Chamber  of  Commerce  of  a  Southern  city  dined 
sumptuously  last  spring,  then  voted  unanimously  that  the  fish 
course  was  good,  after  which  they  were  told  by  a  representative 
of  the  United  States  Fish  Commission  that  it  was  creamed  shark. 
"Although  the  meat  of  some  sharks,  prepared  in  various  ways, 
has  been  eaten,  a  particular  prejudice  has  been  held  against  cer- 
tain kinds  of  sharks,  especially  the  sand  shark,  which  has  been 
claimed  to  be  absolutely  unfit  to  eat.  During  the  summer  of  1918 
the  director  of  the  Woods  Hole  Laboratory  of  the  United  States 
Bureau  of  Fisheries  tested  six  species  of  sharks,  including  the 
sand  shark,  by  supplying  the  meats  as  food  to  about  fifty  persons. 
Served  in  different  ways,  they  were  pronounced  not  only  good, 
but  especially  pleasing  in  flavor  and  texture.  Several  persons 
said  they  were  equal  to  swordfish. ' '  * 

Why  not  eat  shark  ?  Because  he  is  carnivorous,  perhaps,  you 
object,  and  eats  any  kind  of  meat  he  can  get,  including  at  rare 
intervals,  human  flesh.  But  no  one  objects  to  the  speckled  trout 
or  the  gamy  bass,  both  as  carnivorous  as  the  shark  and  quite  as 
willing  to  eat  people  if  the  portions  are  made  small  enough. 
Nearly  all  of  our  food  fish  are  carnivorous,  although  they  ail 
derive  their  ultimate  support  from  the  vegetable  life  of  the 

•Commerce  Report,  October  12,  1917. 

329 


330  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

waters.  Even  the  clear  water  of  the  sea  has  countless  millions 
of  minute  plant  organisms  which  are  eaten  by  many  small  animal 
organisms;  they  in  turn  are  eaten  by  each  other  and  by  the 
smaller  fish,  which  in  their  turn  are  eaten  by  the  larger  fish ;  but 
the  support  of  the  whole  pyramid  of  marine  animal  life  from 
shrimp  to  whale,  like  the  life  of  land  animals,  whether  lion  or 
elephant,  is  based  upon  vegetation. 

"We  have  many  foolish  notions  about  what  is  good  food,  and 
this  seems  to  be  especially  true  about  what  fish  is  good  food. 
There  is  a  pitiful  tale  of  woe  in  the  state  archives  of  Maryland, 
where  it  has  rested  since  it  was  sent  up  to  the  royal  governor 
about  1680  by  the  inhabitants  of  one  of  the  islands  in  Chesa- 
peake Bay.  They  petitioned  that  he  should  send  them  from  the 
royal  bounty  some  food,  for  they  were  about  to  starve.  They 
went  on  to  rehearse  that  their  crops  had  failed  and  that  they 
had  been  forced  to  such  extremities  by  the  approach  of  starvation 
that  they  had  been  compelled  to  go  down  to  the  bay,  dig  up 
oysters  out  of  the  muddy  waters  and  eat  them.  For  the  last  fifty 
years  the  descendants  of  these  same  islanders  have  made  their 
living  by  selling  these  oysters  and  have  eaten  them  whenever 
they  could  afford  them.  At  the  time  of  the  founding  of  this 
nation  no  gentleman  was  willing  to  be  seen  in  an  Atlantic  sea- 
board town  eating  shad,  for  by  condescending  to  such  cheap 
stuff  he  might  indicate  that  he  was  short  of  bacon  at  home.  Yet 
for  several  decades  the  shad  has  been  perhaps  the  most  highly 
prized  of  all  fish  upon  the  Atlantic  seaboard  of  the  United  States. 
So  great  was  the  demand  for  shad  that  it  has  been  nearly 
exterminated. 

Would  you  eat  dogfish?  Instinctively  you  probably  say  no, 
even  if  you  never  saw  one.  The  dogfish  is  a  little  shark  and 
thousands  of  people  cheerfully  ate  him  in  the  last  three  months 
of  1918  after  he  was  renamed,  and,  thus  respectably  camouflaged, 
went  innocently  and  quickly  into  general  use. 

If  we  can  abandon  a  host  of  foolish  prejudices  as  to  what 
kinds  of  fish  are  good  to  eat,  we  have  great  possibilities  of  in- 
creased supply  of  a  kind  of  food  that  is  greatly  needed.  It  has 
been  shown  in  other  chapters  that  our  supplies  of  bread  and 
bread  substitutes  are  almost  unlimited.  The  same  is  true  of 
milk,  and  of  fish.  Meat  is  sharply  limited  and  must  become 


FISH,  A  LITTLE  USED  RESOURCE  331 

scarcer  as  population  increases.  It  is  therefore  a  matter  of  great 
importance  to  the  human  race  that  the  supply  of  fish  may  expand 
almost  indefinitely  and  that  "fish  meat  contains  as  much  body- 
building food  as  beefsteak  and  is  as  readily  digested  as  our  other 
meat."* 

Fish  are  the  cattle  of  the  deep  and  the  deep  is  vast.  Three- 
fourths  of  the  surface  of  this  globe  is  sea.  Most  of  this  150,- 
000,000  square  miles  (fifty  times  the  area  of  the  United  States) 
is  inhabited  by  some  kind  of  fish.  It  has,  however,  been  greatly 
neglected  in  the  past.  So  little  has  it  produced  that  the  sea, 
despite  all  we  hear  of  fish,  has  really  been  a  desert,  a  mere  sepa- 
rator of  continents,  a  highway. 

One  must  not  get  the  impression  that  all  of  the  sea  is  equally 
good  for  fish.  Some  parts,  far  from  land,  are  relatively  poor  in 
fish,  and  the  cold  waters  of  the  north  have  more  fish  than  the 
tropics  because  they  have  greater  amounts  of  microscopic  plant- 
food.  The  northern  fish  are  more  easy  to  catch  than  the  tropic 
fish,  because  they  go  in  schools. 

The  fishing  industry,  through  its  connection  with  sea  power 
and  the  romance  and  charm  of  the  ocean,  tends  to  be  over- 
estimated in  its  present  importance.  All  the  fish  that  are  caught 
by  American  fishermen  ($54,000,000,  1908,  last  fish  census)  were 
less  valuable  than  the  tobacco  crop,  not  one-third  as  valuable  as 
the  pork,  not  one-fifth  as  valuable  as  the  butter,  not  one-tenth 
as  valuable  as  the  poultry  and  eggs  annually  produced  in  the 
United  States.  The  fish  of  all  the  world  have  thus  far  been  only 
two-thirds  as  valuable  as  the  poultry  and  eggs  of  the  United 
States.  The  future,  however,  promises  to  increase  the  fish 
supply  much  faster  than  the  egg  supply,  for  the  fish  in  the  main 
take  care  of  their  own  young  and  feed  themselves.  We  merely 
catch  them  after  nature  has  produced  them. 

While  the  industry  has  upon  the  whole  been  much  less  im- 
portant than  many  land  industries,  it  has  been  of  very  great 
importance  in  many  parts  of  the  world.  It  is  probably  true 
that  the  last  half-century,  the  period  of  cheap  meat,  has  been 
a  period  of  temporary  eclipse  of  the  fish  industry  because  during 
that  time  man,  with  the  steamship  and  the  railroad,  has  made 
quick  conquest  of  the  vast  corn  fields,  grain  fields,  and  pastures 

*  Eat  More  Fish,  Division  F,  United  States  Bureau  of  Fisheries. 


332  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

of  the  continental  interiors — a  movement  which  took  him  away 
from  the  sea  and  gave  him  other  meat.  Now  that  the  era  of 
greater  intensity  of  use  of  resources  is  upon  us,  fisheries  with 
their  great  possibilities  of  increase  promise  to  rise  more  and 
more  in  the  service  of  man.  What  fish  may  be  to  the  human 
race  is  well  shown  by  Japan,  an  island  kingdom  much  like  Eng- 
land in  size,  population,  and  location.  (See  page  175.)  But 
England  is  rich  in  coal,  iron,  and  trade,  and  can  buy  meat. 
Japan  is  poor  in  coal,  iron,  and  trade,  and  cannot  buy  meat, 
so  she  goes  fishing;  1,300,000  of  her  people  and  thousands  of 
boats  were  engaged  in  fishing  in  1914,  whereas  in  England  in  the 
same  year  but  100,000  people  were  so  engaged. 

The  food  scarcity  resulting  from  the  war  has  given  a  great 
boom  to  the  use  of  fish  for  food.  Canning  and  refrigeration 
have  helped  extend  the  use  of  all  kinds  of  fish.  Canned  crab 
from  Kamchatka  was  a  part  of  the  ration  of  the  armies  on  the 
Western  Front.  Refrigeration  has  permitted  frozen  fish,  fresh 
and  savory,  to  go  from  Canada  to  the  armies  in  France  without 
the  use  of  the  tin  can  or  the  sacrifice  of  fresh  flavor.  Refrig- 
eration plants  were  built  even  under  the  stress  of  the  war  in 
many  corners  of  the  world,  in  Sweden,  in  Australia,  and  in 
Newfoundland,  where  a  fishing  corporation  is  building  a  series 
of  plants  one  of  which  alone  will  hold  ten  million  pounds  of 
frozen  fish.  The  government  of  New  South  Wales  is  building 
a  series  of  government  refrigeration  plants,  the  first  of  which 
has  been  opened  with  ceremony  and  was  expected  to  double  the 
supply  of  fish  produced  by  a  given  set  of  fishermen,  because 
when  they  had  a  good  catch  they  had  often  had  to  throw  fish 
away.  This  is  the  case  in  nearly  all  fish  markets.  No  market 
can  consume  the  fish  that  are  sometimes  caught.  Thus  in  1917 
in  Philadelphia,  in  the  height  of  Mr.  Hoover's  food  conservation 
campaign,  twenty-six  barrels  of  fine  drumfish  were  thrown  over- 
board one  warm  day  because  there  was  not  an  immediate  market 
for  them  when  they  arrived  on  Saturday. 

The  governments  of  many  countries  have  been  trying  to  edu- 
cate their  people  to  eat  all  the  fish  that  are  good  to  eat.  The 
United  States  Bureau  of  Fisheries  has  been  working  diligently 
to  call  the  attention  of  the  people  of  this  country  to  the  fact  that 
there  is  good  eating  in  grayfish,  sablefish,  burbot,  bow  fin,  carp, 


SOME  UNUSED  FISH  388 

whiting,  eulachon,  rays,  menhaden,  sharks,  skates,  "which  here- 
tofore have  been  little  used  or  not  used  at  ail  for  that  purpose. 
The  more  extensive  utilization  of  the  large  number  of  little-used 
fishes  will  greatly  increase  the  food  fish  supply."* 

The  possibilities  and  the  practice  in  connection  with  the  little- 
known  fishes  is  well  indicated  by  the  story  of  "the  redoubtable 
Captain  John  Smith,  who,  while  exploring  Chesapeake  Bay  dur- 
ing the  summer  of  1608,  after  trying  vainly  to  catch  fish  in  a 
frying  pan,  resorted  more  successfully  to  the  sword,  an  instru- 
ment in  the  use  of  which  he  was  doubtless  more  expert.  Included 
in  his  catch  was  a  sting  ray  which  he  found  to  be  no  mean 
antagonist,  for  it  drove  its  tail  spine  into  his  wrist,  inflicting  a 
wound  an  inch  and  a  half  deep,  and  of  such  severity  and  alarm- 
ing consequences  that  the  captain  selected  his  burial  place,  and 
his  companions  busied  themselves  in  digging  his  grave.  Fortu- 
nately the  use  of  a  'precious  oyle'  so  alleviated  the  pain  that  the 
grave  was  not  required  and  the  sturdy  soldier  was  able  to  eat 
his  foe  for  supper. 

"In  the  more  than  three  centuries  since  this  adventure,  which 
so  nearly  cut  short  the  career  of  one  of  the  most  interesting  char- 
acters in  American  history,  not  much  progress  has  been  made 
in  utilizing  the  abundant  food  supply  offered  by  the  skates  and 
rays.  A  few  of  these  fish  are  eaten  in  some  parts  of  the  country, 
but  it  is  safe  to  say  that  on  the  day  in  which  Captain  Smith 
and  his  companions  ate  his  late  enemy  the  per  capita  consump- 
tion of  rays  by  the  white  population  of  the  United  States  prob- 
ably reached  its  maximum.  .  .  . 

"The  sting  rays,  of  which  there  are  a  number  of  species  on  the 
coasts  of  the  United  States,  reach  a  large  size,  being  sometimes 
6  or  7  feet  in  breadth,  with  a  total  length  of  10  or  12  feet,  but 
the  giant  of  its  kind  is  the  so-called  devil-fish,  which  reaches,  and 
by  some  authorities  is  said  to  considerably  exceed  20  feet  in 
breadth,  "f 

As  part  of  this  campaign  for  better  use  of  fish,  the  Nor- 
wegians have  succeeded  in  making  bread  with  twenty  per  cent. 

•United  States  Fish  Commission,  H.  F.  Moore,  Deputy  Commissioner's 
letter,  1918. 

t  Skates  and  Rays,  by  H.  F.  Moore,  Deputy  Commissioner,  Bureau  of 
Fisheries. 


334  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

of  fish,  which  is  said  to  be  very  good,  while  the  Dutch  have 
erected  new  plants  to  take  inedible  fish  and  make  of  them  oil 
and  fish-meal  for  the  feeding  of  swine,  which  will  turn  inedible 
fish  into  edible  pork. 

In  recognition  of  the  importance  of  fisheries  to  Dutch  welfare 
there  was  each  year  for  centuries  a  national  celebration  in  which 
one  of  the  most  important  ceremonies  was  the  public  eating  of 
a  salt  herring  by  the  Dutch  ruler.  The  fleets  of  England  had 
their  origin  on  these  same  fishing  banks  of  the  North  Sea,  and 
later  the  New  Englanders  became  the  pioneer  seamen  of  America 
because  good  fishing  banks  were  near  them.  The  schooner,  the 
fastest  of  all  sailing  vessels,  was  invented  and  is  yet  used  by 
the  fishermen  of  Gloucester,  Massachusetts,  and  in  recognition 
of  the  importance  of  the  sea  industry  to  the  state,  a  codfish  has, 
since  colonial  days,  hung  over  the  desk'  occupied  by  the  speaker 
of  the  Massachusetts  Senate. 


THE  LOCATING  FACTOR  OF  FISHERIES 

Most  of  the  world's  fishing  industry  depends  upon  two  habits 
of  fish  which  enable  us  to  catch  near  the  land  many  of  those  that 
pass  most  of  their  lives  hundreds  of  miles  away  at  sea.  The  first 
is  the  spawning  habit  of  many  species  which  lay  their  eggs  only 
in  rivers  or  in  the  shallow  waters  near  the  shore.  The  second  is 
the  congregation  of  fish  to  feed  upon  the  bottoms,  in  shallow 
waters,  commonly  called  "banks."  The  occurrence  of  such 
banks  near  the  shores  of  northeastern  Asia,  northeastern  North 
America,  and  northwestern  Europe  is  responsible  for  the  three 
greatest  fishing  regions. 


NORTH   ATLANTIC   FISHERIES   OF  AMERICA 

The  fisheries  of  northeastern  North  America  are  based  on  a 
great  combination  of  rivers,  bays,  and  shallow,  off-shore  banks. 
Especially  important  are  the  Grand  Banks  of  Newfoundland  and 
smaller  banks  off  Labrador,  New  England,  and  New  Jersey. 
The  Newfoundland  banks  were  known  to  the  fishermen  of  the 
French  province  of  Normandy  and  Brittany  within  a  dozen 


THE  GRAND  BANKS  335 

years  after  Columbus  had  returned  to  Spain  from  his  first 
voyage.  Unquestionably  the  knowledge  of  these  fishing  banks 
made  a  greater  sensation  in  Europe  than  the  mere  .fact  of  the 
discovery  of  the  new  continent,  because  at  that  date  Europe  was 
poorer  than  now,  and  a  new  food  supply  was  important.  Also 
in  that  day  the  fishing  industry  was  relatively  more  important 
than  at  the  present  time.  Practically  the  whole  of  Europe  was 
Catholic,  and  even  to  those  who  could  afford  meat,  there  were 
many  fast  days  upon  which  fish  must  be  eaten  in  place  of  it. 
Scores  of  vessels  sailed  back  and  forth  from  France  to  these 
Newfoundland  banks  each  year  for  a  century  before  the  French 
made  their  first  settlements  in  the  St.  Lawrence  Valley. 

The  most  important  fish  on  these  and  other  northern  banks  is 
the  cod,  a  fish  which  feeds  along  the  bottom  and  is  commonly 
caught  on  a  " trawl"  which  consists  of  baited  hooks  attached  to 
short  lines  that  are  fastened  at  intervals  of  four  feet  to  a  longer 
line  sometimes  three  thousand  feet  in  length.  These  trawls  are 
attended  to  by  fishermen  in  rowboats  called  dories  that  put  out 
from  the  schooners.  The  men  in  the  dory  take  up  one  end  of 
the  trawl,  which  is  anchored  and  marked  by  a  float,  pass  the 
boat  along  under  it,  and  let  it  down  in  the  water  again  after 
the  fish  have  been  taken  off  and  the  bait  replenished.  Fishing 
on  the  Grand  Banks  is  an  exceedingly  dangerous  calling,  as  the 
banks  are  one  of  the  foggiest  places  in  the  world  and  the 
schooners  often  collide  with  each  other  and  with  the  icebergs, 
the  men  in  the  dories  often  lose  their  bearings  and  drift  away 
to  death,  while  a  single  fearful  storm  sometimes  drowns  scores 
or  even  hundreds  of  fishermen.  To  complete  the  chapter  of 
dangers  the  fishing  banks  are  in  the  path  of  trans-Atlantic 
vessels  which  sometimes  run  down  the  small  fishing  craft  in  the 
fogs. 

These  banks  have  enabled  New  Englanders  to  catch  fish  of  as 
great  value  as  all  those  caught  by  fishermen  of  the  rest  of  the 
United  States.  Massachusetts  and  Maine  are  the  leading  states, 
and  Gloucester,  Massachusetts,  was  long  the  greatest  fish  port  in 
America,  nearly  the  whole  population  being  engaged  in  the  catch- 
ing, curing,  buying,  and  selling  of  fish,  and  the  supplying  of  the 
tackle  and  equipment.  Boston  with  its  better  marketing  facilities 
has  recently  surpassed  Gloucester  as  a  fishing  port. 


SS6  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

The  cod  fisherman  also  catches  halibut  and  hake.  The  Ameri- 
can catch  of  these  is  actually  greater  in  quantity,  though  less 
valuable,  than  the  catch  of  cod.  The  cod  is  at  its  best  in  cold 
waters  and  is  taken  in  greater  quantity  by  the  Canadians  than 
by  the  New  Englanders,  the  people  of  Newfoundland  and 
Labrador  catching  more  codfish  than  all  the  rest  of  the  people 
of  America.  Dried  cod  makes  nearly  two-thirds  of  the  exports 
of  this  northern  dependency  of  Great  Britain. 

Newfoundland  and  Labrador  offer  one  of  the  best  modern 
examples  of  a  people  living  from  one  resource — so  great  is  their 
dependence  upon  fish.  There  is  a  little  iron  mining,  a  little 
lumbering,  and  paper  making,  but  eight-ninths  of  the  exports 
are  fish  products  and  nine-tenths  of  the  workers  are  busy  with 
fish.  The  climate  is  so  cold  and  damp  that  there  is  practically 
no  agriculture,  even  a  garden  being  a  rarity  in  Newfoundland. 
The  people  who  are  not  at  sea  catching  cod,  or  herring,  are  busy 
curing  them.  Some  of  the  cod  are  sold  fresh,  but  most  of  them 
are  cleaned  and  salted  as  soon  as  they  are  brought  to  the  schooner 
by  the  dories,  and  when  the  schooner  reaches  its  port  they  are 
dried  in  the  sun  upon  sheds  which  stretch  conspicuously  along 
the  coasts.  The  herring  is  salted  or  cured  by  smoking  over  a 
slow  fire  after  being  salted. 

The  Nova  Scotia  fishing  industry  with  a  catch  of  $7,000,000 
per  year  before  the  war,  equaled  that  of  Massachusetts,  the 
leading  state  of  the  United  States,  and  the  total  Canadian  catch 
($25,000,000,  1907)  was  slightly  greater  than  that  of  New  Eng- 
land at  the  time  of  the  last  fishing  census,  which  was  in  1908. 
Nova  Scotia  with  her  many  good  harbors  partakes  somewhat  of 
the  character  of  Newfoundland  but,  though  she  catches  nearly 
one-third  of  the  fish  of  Canada,  the  warmer  climate  of  this 
province  enables  the  people  to  engage,  to  a  considerable  extent, 
in  agriculture,  and  they  ship  sheep,  cattle,  and  horses  across  the 
straits  to  the  people  of  Newfoundland,  who  cannot  themselves 
produce  these  animals. 

Fishing  fleets  from  Europe  still  visit  the  Grand  Banks,  and 
although  Newfoundland  belongs  to  Great  Britain,  the  French 
fishermen  may  by  right  of  treaty  fish  along  the  shore  of  the 
greater  part  of  the  island.  They  may  also  land  and  dry  their 
fish,  although  no  permanent  French  settlements  may  be  made. 


THE  EUROPEAN  BANKS  337 

France  also  owns  two  islands,  Miquelon  and  St.  Pierre,  situated 
just  south  of  Newfoundland,  with  a  population  of  a  few  thou- 
sand dependent  entirely  upon  the  fishing  industry.  This  single 
product  serves  to  give  these  islanders  a  per  capita  trade  many 
times  as  heavy  as  that  of  the  United  States. 

NORTH  EUROPEAN  FISHERIES 

The  North  Sea,  so  plagued  with  submarines  these  last  years, 
is  the  greatest  fishing  ground  in  the  world.  It  is  very  shallow 
and  abounds  in  fishing  banks.  It  is  surrounded  by  populous 
lands,  being  within  easy  reach  of  the  British,  French,  Belgian, 
Dutch,  German,  Danish,  Swedish,  and  Norwegian  fishermen,  and 
belongs  alike  to  all  of  them  since  by  the  custom  of  nations  the 
sea  three  miles  and  more  from  shore  is  free  to  all  mankind. 
These  peoples  having  access  to  the  North  Sea  caught  about 
$80,000,000  worth  of  fish  per  year  before  the  war,  the  greater 
part  of  which  came  from  the  North  Sea.  Britain  with  a  catch 
of  $50,000,000  per  year  is  the  second  fishing  nation  of  the 
Western  World,  and  a  close  rival  of  the  United  States. 

The  fleets  of  vessels  that  figured  so  much  in  the  submarine 
war  news  are  mostly  steam  trawlers  and  have  their  headquarters 
at  Aberdeen,  Hull,  Grimsby,  Lowestoft,  Yarmouth,  and  at  Lon- 
don, which  is  the  greatest  fish  market  in  the  world.  The  Dutch, 
by  their  location  more  dependent  upon  the  North  Sea  than  are 
the  British,  catch  nearly  as  much  fish  per  capita  as  the  British 
and  have  a  fishing  fleet  with  twenty  thousand  men.  The  French, 
having  no  important  fishing  banks  along  their  coast,  sail  as  far 
away  as  Newfoundland  and  Iceland. 

In  Iceland,  in  the  Faroe  Islands  and  in  others  west  and  north 
of  Scotland  fishing  is  an  important  industry,  but  Norway  is  of 
all  Western  nations  the  most  dependent  upon  fish.  With  its  cool 
climate,  its  mountainous  rocky  land,  and  its  coast  full  of  bays,  it 
duplicates  in  many  respects  New  England,  Canada,  and  Labra- 
dor, and  like  them  has  great  fisheries  of  cod  and  herring.  The 
cod  are  caught  near  the  Lofoten  Islands  and  the  herring  in  the 
bays  about  Bergen  in  southern  Norway.  The  little  town  of  Stav- 
anger  canned  thirty-two  million  herring  in  1917,  two  fish  in  each 
box.  The  catch  of  fish  is  about  five  times  as  great  per  capita  as 


338  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

in  Great  Britain.  Fish  and  fish  products  make  up  more  than  a 
third  of  Norway's  export,  and  Norwegian  codfish,  codfish  oil, 
and  herring  are  known  in  many  lands. 


FISHERIES  OF  JAPAN 

On  the  coasts  of  northeastern  Asia  is  a  fishing  region  of  great 
importance.  Here  again  we  have  a  cool  climate  and  irregular 
coasts  similar  to  those  in  the  same  latitudes  in  eastern  North 
America  and  western  Europe.  The  Japanese  are  credited  with 
eating  more  fish  than  any  other  people  in  the  world.  Two 
reasons  account  for  this.  In  addition  to  the  almost  entire  ab- 
sence of  the  meat  animals  in  Japan,  there  is  the  abundance  of 
fish  in  the  waters  surrounding  the  islands  and  thus  tempting  the 
people  to  go  to  sea.  Yezo,  the  northernmost  of  the  four  large 
islands  of  Japan,  is  too  cold  for  rice  growing,  much  of  it  is  too 
rough  for  any  other  kind  of  agriculture,  so  its  people,  like  those 
of  Norway  and  Newfoundland,  have  depended  almost  entirely 
upon  the  catch  of  cod,  herring,  and  other  fish  of  cool  temperate 
latitudes. 

Japanese  fishermen  scour  the  coasts  of  Asia,  especially  those 
of  Korea,  the  Kurile  Islands  to  the  north,  desolate  Kamchatka, 
and  Sakhalien,  a  barren  and  almost  uninhabitable  island  on  the 
Siberian  coast  near  the  mouth  of  the  Amur  River.  Half  of  this 
island  the  Japanese  were  careful  to  secure  by  treaty  at  the  close 
of  the  Russo-Japanese  War.  Thus  they  guaranteed  their  fish- 
eries, which  furnished  not  only  the  chief  animal  food  of  fifty 
million  people  but  also  an  important  fertilizer,  made  of  dried 
fish  refuse  and  non-edible  fish,  and  extensively  used  in  the  well- 
tilled  garden-like  farms  of  Japan.  The  thrifty  and  enterprising 
Japanese  have  of  recent  years  begun  to  sell  in  the  United  States 
and  in  Europe  attractively  packed  cans  of  crab  meat,  the  flesh 
of  a  giant  crustacean  caught  in  the  deep  cold  waters  along  the 
bleak  shores  of  the  faraway  Kamchatka.  During  the  war  the 
exports  of  this  commodity  as  well  as  canned  salmon  and  other 
fish  have  increased  greatly  to  help  fill  the  meat  shortage  of  the 
Allied  countries. 


WE  ARE  LEARNING  TO  FISH  339 

THE   FISHERIES   OF   THE   OPEN   SEA 

Mackerel,  unlike  the  cod,  are  surface  swimmers,  and  are  caught 
in  nets  swinging  in  the  open  sea.  They  are  caught  off  the  coasts 
of  Europe  and  the  United  States,  and  immediately  salted. 

Another  surface  fish  caught  by  nets  as  he  swims  near  the  sur- 
face is  the  menhaden,  taken  chiefly  off  the  northeast  coast  of  the 
United  States  within  a  hundred  miles  of  New  York.  This  fish 
has  not  been  considered  good  for  food  until  the  recent  educa- 
tional campaign  started  by  the  United  States  Fish  Commission. 
For  many  years  a  valuable  oil  has  been  extracted  from  its  flesh 
and  the  dry  remains  brought  high  prices  as  a  fertilizer  rich  in 
nitrogen  and  phosphorus.  Floating  fertilizer  factories  have 
for  years  steamed  up  and  down  the  coast  manufacturing  this  oil 
and  fertilizer  from  the  menhaden  brought  in  by  the  fishing  tugs 
that  operate  the  nets. 

The  sardine,  deriving  its  name  from  Sardinia,  is  a  small 
pilchard,  commonly  dried,  packed  in  oil,  and  sold  in  sealed  cans. 
It  is  exported  largely  from  France,  the  sardines  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean being  packed  for  shipment  at  Beauclaire  on  the  Rhone, 
while  Bordeaux  and  Lemans  are  two  great  centers  of  the  industry 
on  the  Bay  of  Biscay.  Sardines  are  also  caught  along  the  coasts 
of  Spain,  Portugal,  and  Italy,  but  a  kind  of  sprat  is  often  sold 
under  the  name  of  sardine.  Sardine  fisheries  reach  their  greatest 
importance  in  Brittany,  the  northwest  province  of  France,  where 
the  failure  of  the  sardines  to  appear  in  the  neighboring  seas  for 
a  season  has  caused  as  many  as  eighty  thousand  persons  to  be  in 
a  starving  condition,  dependent  for  their  lives  upon  the  dona- 
tions of  the  French  Government.  Along  the  coast  of  New  Eng- 
land, especially  in  Maine,  there  has  long  been  an  important  in- 
dustry in  the  so-called  " American  sardines"  which  are  really 
small  herring,  a  fish  closely  allied  to  the  pilchard.  "Genuine 
sardines  packed  in  olive  oil"  have  for  years  been  sold  from 
certain  thrifty  towns  along  the  eastern  coast  of  North  America, 
but  since  the  passage  of  a  pure  food  law  the  same  plants  now 
modestly  sell  cans  whose  labels  state  that  they  contain  small 
herring  packed  in  cottonseed  oil.  The  nutritive  value  is  about 
the  same.  Many  kinds  of  fish  can  be  packed  in  many  kinds 
of  oil,  depending  upon  the  price  of  the  oil.  Although  the 


340 


THE  FISH  SUPPLY 


Maine  "sardine"  canners  have  to  dry  their  herring  with  arti- 
ficial heat  while  the  Frenchmen  do  it  in  the  sun,  the  American 
product  is  much  cheaper,  and  is  shipped  to  all  parts  of  the 
United  States  and  South  America. 

Whaling  is  of  all  fishing  enterprises  the  least  connected  with 
home  ports  of  ships  or  with  particular  shores.     It  is  an  industry 


FIG.  106. — A    whale    about    to    be    rendered— our    greatest    meat    animal. 
(Courtesy  Canadian  Bureau  of  Fisheries.) 

that  is  just  emerging  from  a  half-century  of  eclipse.  It  was  of 
very  great  importance  in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
when  whale  oil  supplied  the  family  lamp.  In  those  days  New 
Bedford  and  Nantucket  in  Massachusetts,  and  New  London,  Con- 
necticut, were  the  great  outfitting  centers  of  an  industry  that 
was  prosecuted  in  all  oceans  of  the  world  so  persistently  that  the 
whale  was  nearly  exterminated  by  1860,  when  the  discovery  of 
petroleum  lessened  the  demand  for  whale  oil.  Some  whale  fish- 
ing is  still  carried  on,  but  the  whalers  of  Nantucket  have  changed 
their  base  to  San  Francisco,  so  that  they  may  be  nearer  the  home 
of  the  whale,  now  chiefly  caught  in  the  Arctic  Ocean  near 
Bering  Straits.  There  is  still  some  fishing  in  tropic  waters  for 
the  sperm  whale,  which  has  in  his  head  a  white  mass  called 
spermaceti,  useful  jn  the  preparation  of  sperm  candles  and  cer- 


THE  WHALE  AS  FOOD  341 

tain  ointments.  Dundee,  Scotland,  is,  besides  San  Francisco,  the 
only  other  important  whaling  port.  The  whaling  industry  is 
about  to  experience  a  revival.  The  future  peace  of  the  poor 
whale  seems  to  be  imperiled  for  all  time.  It  was  cloudy,  indeed, 
in  1860  when  petroleum  took  his  place  in  the  family  lamp  and 
gave  him  a  respite.  The  discovery  of  the  art  of  manufacturing 
steel  substitutes  for  whale-bone  still  further  emancipated  him 
from  the  harpoon  of  man,  but  from  now  on  he  must  lead  a 
pursued  life.  Alas  for  the  great  leviathan !  his  peace  while  man 
survives  is  gone !  we  have  discovered  during  the  war  that  he  is 
good  to  eat. 

The  issue  of  the  Pacific  Fisherman  for  September,  1917,  con- 
tains the  following  paragraph,  under  the  title  ' '  Whale  Meat  in 
San  Francisco": 

The  experimental  placing  of  whale  meat  on  the  menu  of  the  Palace 
Hotel  one  day  in  July  served  to  bring  it  before  the  public  sufficiently 
for  some  of  the  hotels,  restaurants,  and  markets  to  take  it  up.  Whale 
meat  in  August  was  selling  in  the  California  market,  San  Francisco,  at 
22V2  cents  a  pound.  This  seems  to  be  too  high  a  price  for  popularity, 
although  it  is  cheaper  than  beef,  when  the  absence  of  waste  is  con- 
sidered. The  Palace  and  St.  Francis  hotels  and  the  St.  Germain 
restaurant  in  San  Francisco  now  have  whale  meat  daily  on  their  menu. 

The  inspector  of  the  Bureau  of  Animal  Industries  at  Seattle, 
Washington,  made  a  report  telling  of  the  successful  use  of  whale 
meat  and  the  experience  of  his  own  family  with  it. 

A  steak  prepared  at  home  was  partaken  of  by  three  members  of 
my  family,  having  no  previous  knowledge  of  the  character  of  the  meat, 
as  beefsteak.* 

It  has  already  reached  Boston  and  been  sold  and  utilized 
acceptably.  If  we  do  not  exterminate  the  whale  with  too  per- 
sistent fishing,  we  have  here  an  important  source  of  meat.  For 
several  years  past  it  has  been  estimated  that  fifteen  to  twenty 
thousand  of  these  huge  carcasses  have  been  turned  adrift  in 
the  Antarctic  Ocean  to  feed  the  gulls  and  other  scavengers  of 
the  sea.  They  might  just  as  well  come,  canned  or  frozen,  to 
augment  our  failing  meat  supply,  and  doubtless  they  will  do  so. 

*  Commerce  Report,  1917. 


342  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

SHORE  AND   RIVER   FISHERIES 

Many  rivers  and  bays  have  a  fishing  value  out  of  proportion 
to  their  area  because  of  the  sea  fish  that  annually  enter  them  for 
spawning  and  become  the  rich  harvest  of  the  fishermen. 

The  sturgeon,  the  largest  of  these  visitors,  is  a  fish  that  grows 
as  much  as  ten  feet  long  and  is  also  found  to  some  extent  in  the 
American  Great  Lakes  *  and  the  rivers  of  the  Atlantic,  especially 
the  Delaware,  but  in  greatest  quantity  in  the  Caspian  Sea, 
whence  years  ago  it  ran  up  the  Volga  River  in  such  quantities 
that  at  times  they  crowded  each  other  out  of  the  water  in  narrow 
places.  The  sturgeon  is  caught  chiefly  for  its  eggs,  which  are 
sold  as  Russian  caviar,  and  the  industry  has  been  prosecuted  so 
vigorously  that  this  valuable  fish  is  about  to  become  extinct. 
The  industry  has  practically  disappeared  from  the  Atlantic 
rivers  of  America  and  has  greatly  diminished  throughout  the 
world ;  but  the  rising  price  of  caviar  makes  sturgeon  containing 
eggs  more  and  more  valuable,  and  the  quest  more  fierce — another 
example  of  the  wanton  waste  perpetuated  by  men,  and  another 
example  of  the  need  of  social  control  in  industry. 

The  salmon,  of  which  there  are  several  species,  is  easily  the 
(economic)  king  of  all  river  running  fish.  It  is  said  to  ascend 
only  streams  having  their  sources  in  glacial  lakes  in  which  the 
females  deposit  their  eggs.  Salmon  are  found  to  some  extent  in 
northwestern  Europe,  New  England,  and  Canada ;  but  the  rivers 
of  the  north  Pacific,  between  San  Francisco  and  Japan,  are  the 
chief  sources  of  world  supply.  In  Alaska  they  have  for  an  un- 
known period  been  almost  the  only  food  supply  of  the  natives, 
who  at  the  time  of  the  annual  run  put  away  the  year's  supply 
of  smoked  salmon  in  little  houses  on  high  poles,  out  of  the  reach 
of  wolves  and  dogs. 

For  many  years  salmon  canning  has  been  an  important  indus- 
try on  the  Pacific  Coast.  It  was  first  established  in  California, 
Oregon,  and  Washington,  then  in  British  Columbia,  and  finally 
in  Alaska,  where  in  almost  every  river,  especially  the  great 
Yukon,  salmon  are,  or  were,  exceedingly  abundant.  They  run 
in  great  numbers,  and  a  common  method  of  catching  them  for 

*  This  marine  fish,  like  the  seals  of  the  Caspian  Sea,  seems  to  have 
survived  from  the  time  when  these  inland  bodies  of  watei  were  connected 
with  the  ocean. 


SEA  FISH  IN  RIVERS  343 

the  cannery  is  by  the  fish  wheel,  a  large  water  wheel  revolving 
in  the  swift  current  and  having  wire  baskets  which  catch  the 
salmon  and  throw  them  into  a  boat  below  the  wheel.  Large 
salmon  canneries  have  been  built  at  the  mouths  of  various  streams 
in  Alaska  along  coasts  so  rocky  and  cold  as  to  be  undesirable  for 
human  habitation  throughout  most  of  the  year.  As  the  season 
for  the  salmon  running  approaches,  sailing  vessels  loaded  with 
empty  cans  and  carrying  many  workmen,  usually  Chinese,  leave 
San  Francisco,  Portland,  or  Seattle  for  the  cannery.  In  a  few 
weeks  hundreds  of  thousands  of  pounds  of  salmon  are  canned, 
loaded  into  the  sailing  vessels,  and  brought  back  to  the  home 
port  for  distribution  throughout  the  United  States,  the  United 
Kingdom,  Australasia,  and  to  a  lesser  extent  to  many  other  coun- 
tries. Salmon  is  the  chief  fish  export  of  the  United  States  (1911, 
forty  million  pounds,  $4,000,000;  1918,  one  hundred  and  ten 
million  pounds,  $16,000,000).  The  Japanese  also  have  a  salmon 
canning  industry  in  the  colder  part  of  their  empire. 

The  shad,  probably  the  most  highly  prized  of  American  food 
fish,  ascends  each  spring  the  rivers  from  Florida  to  the  St. 
Lawrence.  North  of  the  Delaware  this  fish  is  unimportant  and 
the  estuaries  of  the  Chesapeake  furnish  about  one-half  of  the 
total  catch.  The  herring  also  ascends  these  same  rivers  in  such 
numbers  that  at  times  their  scaly  backs  make  the  surface  of  the 
water  shine  almost  like  a  mirror.  These  herring  are  easily 
caught,  for  they  crowd  the  small  streams  in  such  numbers  that 
they  squeeze  into  the  water  wheels  that  lift  water  from  an  arm 
of  the  Chesapeake  into  the  Chesapeake  and  Delaware  Canal, 
where,  unable  to  escape,  they  perish  in  the  fresh  water  by  the 
thousands,  their  decaying  bodies  becoming  a  nuisance.  These 
fish  help  to  show  the  great  value  of  the  sea  as  a  part  of  man's 
support  and  also  help  to  explain  the  great  excellence  of  the 
region  of  the  Chesapeake  Bay  in  eastern  North  America  as  a 
place  for  the  easy  support  of  humanity.  For  a  half-century  past 
the  herring  has  been  sold  in  this  region  in  the  spring  for  less 
than  one  cent  each,  often  $4  or  $5  a  thousand.  Since  one  of 
these  fish  is  quite  as  much  as  the  average  person  needs  for  a  meal, 
and  since  corn  meal  in  that  region  has  in  most  of  this  period  cost 
not  over  two  cents  a  pound,  it  is  plain  that  the  cost  of  living  has 
been  exceedingly  low.  For  a  pound  of  corn  meal  and  a  herring 


344  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

contain  over  two  thousand  calories,  and  a  man  only  needs  three 
thousand  per  day. 

SHELLFISH 

A  number  of  marine  animals,  such  as  the  oyster,  the  clam,  the 
lobster,  and  the  sponge  live  in  shallow  waters  where  they  can 
easily  be  caught.  The  oyster,  of  which  the  United  States  sup- 
plies from  five-sixths  to  nine-tenths  of  the  world's  catch,  is  the 
most  valuable  fish  product  in  America,  furnishing  about  one- 
third  of  the  total  value  of  all  fisheries  of  the  United  States. 
This  delicious  shellfish  lives  on  the  sandy  or  gravelly  bottoms 
of  shallow  bays  and  estuaries.  It  is  found  to  some  extent  in  the 
English  Channel  and  the  Bay  of  Biscay  and  on  the  Pacific  Coast 
of  the  United  States ;  but  the  numerous  bays  between  Cape  Cod 
and  the  coast  of  Mexico,  with  their  large  expanses  of  shallow 
water  of  suitable  temperature,  seem  to  be  the  best  place  in  the 
world  for  oysters.  The  oysters  of  best  repute  are  produced  be- 
tween Cape  Cod  and  Cape  Hatteras.  The  Chesapeake  Bay,  an 
old  river  valley  into  which  the  sea  has  flowed,  is  the  most  im- 
portant district  of  all  for  oysters,  while  Long  Island  Sound  is 
second.  The  Middle  Atlantic  States  supply  two-thirds  of  the 
total  American  product. 

The  oyster,  after  being  hatched  from  the  egg,  swims  around  for 
a  time  and  then  attaches  itself  to  some  firm  substance,  such  as 
gravel,  an  old  oyster  shell,  or  sunken  wood.  For  one,  two,  or  three 
years  he  eats  whatever  the  tide  brings  him,  and  is  then  scooped 
up  with  long-handled  tongs  in  the  hands  of  an  oysterman  or  by 
a  steam-drawn  dredge.  During  the  seven  or  eight  months  of  the 
season  oysters  are  shipped  in  barrels  and  sacks  to  many  parts 
of  the  United  States  and  even  to  Europe,  while  at  Baltimore 
there  is  a  large  canning  industry,  the  product  of  which  goes  to 
small  interior  towns  and  to  foreign  countries.  The  natural 
supply  having  been  found  inadequate,  oyster  culture  has  been 
established.  Beds  of  young  oysters  are  sometimes  planted,  that 
is,  put  down  to  grow  large ;  another  method  is  to  lay  old  oyster 
shells  and  the  bushy  tops  of  trees  upon  the  bottoms  of  the  bays 
so  that  there  may  be  something  to  which  the  floating  spawn  may 
attach  themselves  and  grow.  One  great  trouble  with  oyster 
planting  is  the  ease  with  which  a  thief  may  carry  off  the  product 


OYSTER  FARMING  845 

at  night  or  during  a  fog,  but  the  possibilities  of  the  extension  of 
the  oyster  industry  in  Long  Island  Sound  and  in  the  Delaware, 
the  Chesapeake,  and  the  other  bays  along  the  eastern  and  south- 
ern coasts  of  the  United  States  are  very  great  and  tempting  to 
enterprise.  Oyster  culture  is  another  example  of  an  industry 
that  depends  upon  good  government  and  perishes  with  anarchy, 
— even  a  very  short  outbreak  of  anarchy.  This  is  well  shown  by 
the  better  yields  in  the  Virginia  section  than  in  the  Maryland 
section  of  the  Chesapeake  Bay.  In  Maryland  the  political  parties 
are  evenly  divided  and  the  fishermen 's  vote  is  a  factor  capable  of 
carrying  elections,  so  that  at  times  the  state  administration  has 
hesitated  to  use  the  firm  hand  necessary  to  hold  the  oystermen 
in  check.  The  oystermen  have  sometimes  taken  advantage  of  the 
weakness  of  the  government  to  arm  themselves,  man  their  boats, 
and  drive  away  the  oyster  patrol,  after  which  these  temporary 
pirates  have  proceeded  for  days  at  a  time  to  load  their  boats 
with  planted  oysters  whose  owners  dare  not  protect  their  prop- 
erty. Such  outbreaks,  however,  must  be  regarded  as  temporary. 
A  good  piece  of  oyster  bottom  is  too  valuable  a  resource  to  be 
permanently  wasted  by  a  people  more  advanced  than  the  Turk. 
The  industry  is  long  past  the  experimental  stage.  The  United 
States  Fish  Commission  reported  in  1914  that  forty-six  per  cent, 
of  the  quantity  and  sixty-five  per  cent,  of  the  value  of  the  Ameri- 
can oysters  were  from  planted  grounds.  The  output  of  many 
states  depended  largely  and  some  of  them  entirely  upon  oyster 
culture.  In  the  New  England  States  ninety-three  per  cent,  were 
derived  from  private  beds,  on  the  Pacific  Coast,  seventy-three 
per  cent. ;  in  New  York,  eighty -six  per  cent. ;  in  the  Gulf  States 
about  fifty  per  cent.  It  is  only  in  the  Middle  Atlantic  and  South 
Atlantic  States,  where  oysters  are  naturally  abundant,  that  the 
public  beds  are  more  productive  than  the  private  beds.  If  the 
natural  oyster  lands  along  the  American  coast  were  fully  util- 
ized, the  production  could  be  easily  several  times  that  of  the 
present. 

Clams  and  lobsters  yield  a  greater  cash  return  to  the  Ameri- 
can fisherman  than  does  the  codfish.  The  clam  is  a  cousin  of  the 
oyster  but  possesses  power  of  locomotion  and  is  caught  by  being 
dug  out  of  the  mud.  It  is  especially  important  along  the  New 
England  and  Middle  Atlantic  coast. 


346  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

The  much-prized  lobster,  a  great  crayfish  and  cousin  to  the 
crab,  lives  along  the  seashore  and,  from  the  mouth  of  the  St. 
Lawrence  River  to  the  mouth  of  the  Delaware,  is  caught  in  a 
baited  box  trap  called  a  lobster  pot.  The  high  esteem  of  the 
lobster  causes  it  to  bring  about  four  times  as  much  per  pound 
as  the  codfish.  The  consequent  keen  prosecution  of  lobster  fish- 
ing has  caused  the  passage  of  severe  laws  to  prevent  its  exter- 
mination along  the  coasts  of  the  United  States.  These  laws  are, 
however,  very  difficult  to  enforce,  and  the  fifty  per  cent,  decline 
in  the  lobster  industry  of  New  Brunswick  between  1897  and  1916 
is  a  strong  indication  of  the  need  of  greater  wisdom  in  the  con- 
duct of  such  an  important  food  industry.  Most  of  the  present 
supply  comes  from  Canada ;  the  Newfoundland  export  of  canned 
lobster  is  very  important.  Canada  uses  but  eight  per  cent,  of 
her  lobster  output;  thirty  per  cent,  of  it  goes  to  the  United 
States,  leaving  sixty-two  per  cent,  for  overseas  shipment. 

THE    IMPORTANCE    OF   FISH    TO    THE    ATLANTIC    PLAIN    OF    THE 
UNITED   STATES 

In  the  central  part  of  the  Atlantic  Plain  of  the  United  States, 
unusual  fish  resources  combine  with  many  other  resources  to 
make  the  peninsula  between  the  Chesapeake  Bay  and  the  Atlantic 
Ocean  one  of  the  most  favored  places  in  the  United  States  or 
the  world  for  the  easy  support  of  the  human  race  under  physical 
conditions  that  place  no  serious  handicap  on  man.  The  climate 
is  wholesome  and  invigorating;  the  varied  soil,  abundant  rain- 
fall, and  satisfactory  temperature  permit  the  commercial  pro- 
duction of  an  unusual  variety  of  grains,  fruits,  and  vegetables, 
while  fish  products  reach  their  maximum  of  abundance.  The  bay 
with  its  many  arms  is  the  greatest  place  in  the  world  for  oysters, 
shad,  and  herring.  Many  minor  fish  are  caught  there,  while  the 
many  breaks  in  the  coastline  permit  fishing  also  in  the  open  sea. 
Herring  are  so  abundant  that  the  laboring  man  has  been  able  in 
the  spring  time  to  buy  a  thousand  for  from  $2  to  $5,  and  with  a 
sack  of  salt  and  a  barrel  they  can  be  preserved  for  the  entire  year. 
As  herring  and  corn  bread  make  a  sustaining  meal  for  a  work- 
ing man  (materials  costing  two  cents),  living  is  exceedingly 
cheap.  The  shores  of  these  waters  are  in  many  places  marshy, 


GOOD  LIVING  ON  THE  CHESAPEAKE  347 

making  excellent  feeding  grounds  for  wild  ducks  as  they  pass 
in  fall  and  spring  between  the  wilds  of  Canada  and  the  swamps 
of  the  tropics,  so  that  along  the  Chesapeake  in  addition  to  its 
resources  of  land,  bay,  and  sea,  hunting  is  still  an  important 
source  of  support  of  the  population  because  they  can  get  ducks 
that,  like  the  fish,  are  the  emigrating  product  of  another  locality. 
This  peninsula  differs  but  little  from  the  tidewater  region  on 
the  west  of  the  bay  and  its  advantages  are  in  the  main  typical  of 
the  whole  Atlantic  coastal  plain  that  extends  from  the  fall  line 
on  the  Atlantic  rivers,  to  the  ocean,  and  includes  Long  Island 
and  Florida.  When  one  considers  that  the  average  rural  Negro 
of  eastern  and  southern  United  States  has  a  garden,  can  pick 
wild  berries,  go  hunting  and  fishing,  and  is  largely  contented 
with  corn  bread  and  salt  herring,  it  is  plain  how  he  is  able  to 
live  without  working  much  of  the  time,  even  during  the  stress 
of  the  Great  War. 

FISH   IN    COMMERCE 

Foreign  commerce  in  fish  is  not  important  in  the  countries 
having  the  greatest  industry.  The  United  States  and  Great 
Britain  consume  about  as  many  fish  as  they  catch,  Canadian  fish 
coming  into  the  United  States  to  replace  the  salmon  and  sardines 
exported.  Before  the  war  the  United  Kingdom  exported  herring 
to  Germany  and  Russia  and  imported  American  salmon  and 
French  sardines  in  their  stead.  Labrador,  Newfoundland,  Nova 
Scotia,  and  Norway,  lands  of  small  population,  export  the  greater 
part  of  the  fish  they  catch,  chiefly  cod,  with  herring  second  in 
importance.  The  great  fish-importing  countries  are  Italy,  Spain, 
and  Portugal,  where  the  Catholic  Church  lays  certain  restrictions 
upon  the  use  of  meat  and  the  poverty  of  the  masses  of  the  people 
limits  them  to  a  food  that  is  cheaper  than  meat.  The  Spanish- 
American  countries  and  Brazil  are  also  important  fish  importers 
for  the  same  reasons  that  exist  in  south  Europe  and  the  added 
one  that  in  such  hot  climates  fresh  meat  and  fresh  fish  spoil  very 
quickly  while  the  dried  cod,  resembling  a  piece  of  wood  in  hard- 
ness, appearance,  and  durability,  keeps  indefinitely  even  in  hot 
climates.  The  dried  cod  or  stock  fish  is,  in  combination  with 
corn  bread  or  corn  meal  mush,  a  staple  article  of  diet  alike  in 
Venice  and  Valparaiso,  Lisbon  and  Yucatan. 


348  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

THE  FUTURE  SUPPLY  OF  FISH 

Promises  to  be  not  unlike  the  future  supply  of  potatoes  or  milk, 
almost  as  large  as  we  have  a  mind  to  make  it.  It  is  probably  true 
that  we  now  have  the  possibility  of  increasing  our  fish  supply  five 
or  ten,  or  fifteen,  perhaps  thirty  or  forty  fold,  without  making 
any  great  increase  in  the  part  of  a  man's  daily  wage  needed  to 
buy  a  given  amount  of  nourishment  in  the  form  of  fish.  This 
increased  supply  depends  upon  four  factors. 

1.  The  application  of  COMMON  SENSE  in  the  question  of  what 
is  food,  and  eating  all  the  fish  that  are  good  for  food.  In  this 
connection  the  present  campaign  by  the  United  States  Fish  Com- 
mission and  the  arrival  of  the  shark  and  the  whale  upon  our 
tables  are  examples  of  a  method  that  may  easily  double  our  fish- 
supply.*  Predictions  of  so  many  more  fish  rest  upon  the  great 
basic  facts  that  the  sea  is  vast  and  the  species  of  fish  therein  are 
many.  The  United  States  Food  Administration  says : 

There  have  been  cases  where  a  ship  has  sailed  for  over  twenty-five 
miles  through  waters  the  surface  of  which  was  literally  alive  with  fish, 
of  one  variety  only.  And  when  you  stop  to  think  that  this  was  but  one 
small  group  of  fish  among  all  those  which  roam  and  school  in  both 
surface  and  bottom  areas,  it  is  easy  to  understand  how  impossible  it 
is  that  commercial  fishing  should  dangerously  deplete  our  total  supplies 
of  edible  salt-water  fish.f 

"  We  catch  lobsters  wastefully  and  neglect  the  chief  enemy  of  the 
lobsters— the  Squalus,  an  excellent  fish  for  the  table,  but  not  as  yet 
used  for  food  because  its  ugliness  of  mien  is  so  depressing  to  the  finer 
sensibilities  of  the  deep-sea  fisherman."  \ 

Eating  the  lobster's  enemy  and  then  eating  the  lobster  sounds 
like  good  business. 

*  The  Japanese  are  putting  tough  and  muscular  fish  like  the  skate 
through  the  meat  chopper,  after  which  it  is  canned  or  made  into  sausages 
or  loaves  called  "  Kamaboka  " 

t  Literary  Digest,  June  15,  1918. 

j  Letter  of  R.  T.  Morris: 

"  We  shall  change  all  that  when  we  are  forced  to  drop  sentiment  in 
favor  of  nitrogen.  Aside  from  great  quantities  of  unused  fish,  the  bot- 
toms of  millions  of  acres  of  shallow  waters  are  studded  with  albuminous 
jewels  called  clams.  There  are  parts  of  the  northern  coast  from  Maine 
to  Labrador  where  these  are  so  abundant  that  they  actually  constitute  a 
considerable  proportion  of  the  floor  of  the  bays,  and  yet  they  are  for 
the  most  part  unused." — R.  T.  MOBBIS,  Surgeon's  Philosophy,  p.  239. 


WE  ARE  STILL  LEARNING  TO  FISH  349 

Man    has    only    begun    to    draw    upon    this    self-replenishing 
mine. 

2.  NEW  METHODS.    We  are  just  learning  how  to  catch  fish. 
It  is  indeed  surprising  to  think  that  man  only  began  to  catch 
sardines  on  the  coast  of  Spain  in  1862,  and  that  for  forty  years 
they  were  taken  in  little  rowboats  manned  by  two  or  three  men. 
In  1900  there  came  a  revolution  through  the  introduction  of  a 
sailing  vessel  of  forty  to  sixty  tons  with  twenty-five  men.     In 
1915  they  introduced  the  first  steam  vessels,  which  could  go 
eighty  or  one  hundred  miles  from  shore,  and  produced  a  great 
increase  in  the  catch.     These  facts  may  almost  be  said  to  be 
typical  of  the  fishing  industry,  and  when  one  remembers  how 
long  Spain  and  Portugal  have  been  hungry  they  become  almost 
difficult  of  belief.     Improvements  have  recently  been  made  in 
the  operation  of  great  nets  hundreds  of  yards  long  between 
steamers  that  scour  the  open  sea. 

3.  THE  FISH  OF  WARM  CLIMATES  AND  DISTANT  PLACES.    The 
greatest  revolution  of  all  lies  in  the  ice  chest — artificial  refrigera- 
tion.   The  people  of  the  West  Indies  have  eaten  the  dried  fish  of 
Labrador  and  Norway  largely  because  Labrador  and  Norway  had 
a  cool  climate  in  which  fish  would  not  spoil  the  same  afternoon  it 
was  caught.     Largely  for  this  reason  the  teeming  fish  of  tropic 
waters  have  busily  eaten  each  other  up  almost  undisturbed  by 
man.     Now  the  steam-driven  fishing  vessel  with  its  engines  and 
ammonia  pipes  can  dump  the  fish  into  an  ice  room,  or  into 
freezing  tanks  and  imbed  them  in  a  mass  of  solid  ice  in  a  few 
hours,  to  be  kept  a  week,  or  a  month,  or  a  year,  and  sold  in  this 
continent  or  the  next,  as  market  conditions  may  dictate.     There 
is  no  reason  now  why  fish  that  sport  around  the  shores  of 
Florida,  or  Hawaii,  or  far  Fiji,  may  not  be  imbedded  in  ice 
blocks,   loaded   into  holds  of   European   steamers   at   Havana, 
Honolulu,  or  any  South  Sea  Island  bight,  for  consumption  three 
months  later  in  Belgium,  Italy,  or  Bulgaria,  or  if  the  markets 
do  not  require  them  in  fresh  condition  they  can  with  the  aid  of 
ice  be  carried  from  the  reefs  where  they  are  caught  to  some 
tropic  canning  factory  for  manufacture  into  forms  desirable 
anywhere.     Thus  a  new  canning  factory  is  being  erected  in 
Hawaii,  to  be  supplied  in  part  by  steam  vessels  that  go  off  for  a 
two-weeks'  cruise,  visiting  uninhabited  islets  several  hundred 


350  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

miles  to  the  south.  Experiments  by  the  United  States  Fish  Com- 
mission in  the  drying  of  squids,  thus  far  used  almost  entirely  for 
bait,  but  really  very  nutritious,  shows  yet  a  third  way  of  bring- 
ing fish  to  the  distant  market.  These  three  methods,  artificial 
drying,  canning,  and  refrigeration,  really  throw  open  to  the 
world  market  the  entire  fishing  resources  of  the  tropic,  the  great- 
est of  the  zones,  with  its  unnumbered  islands,  shores,  and  bays, 
and  its  almost  inconceivable  quantities  of  fish.  In  Hawaii  alone 
there  are  one  hundred  and  five  varieties  of  edible  fish ;  and  as  an 
example  of  tropic  abundance  the  following  statements  by  the 
American  consul,  Mr.  Chapman,  at  Mazatlan,  on  the  west  coast 
of  Mexico  in  1917,  are  probably  typical  of  a  thousand  such 
localities : 

Fish  are  so  plentiful  in  these  waters  that  it  is  a  common  sight  to 
see  men  catching  them  with  loose  lines  in  the  surf  across  the  street  200 
feet  from  the  consulate  windows,  or  to  see  sardines  flipping  out  of  the 
water  by  the  hundreds  in  their  efforts  to  escape  the  larger  fish  that 
prey  upon  them;  sea-birds  gather  at  the  scene  of  the  disturbance,  and 
in  a  few  minutes  each  morning  catch  as  many  of  the  little  fish  as  they 
want. 

There  are  some  40  or  50  shrimp  fisheries  along  the  Pacific  shore  line 
within  this  consular  district,  with  the  trading  center  of  the  industry  at 
Mazatlan.  Most  of  the  shrimp  are  collected  during  the  rainy  season — 
from  July  to  November — in  numerous  shallow  lagoons  along  the  sea- 
shore. They  are  brought  in  from  the  adjacent  waters  of  the  Pacific 
Ocean  by  the  currents.  It  often  happens  that  there  are  large  areas  of 
the  sea  literally  filled  with  them.* 

In  the  consideration  of  ultimate  fish  supply  we  should  never 
lose  sight  of  the  Pacific,  vast,  fifty  million  square  miles  of  it,  with 
such  a  multitude  of  islands  that  they  are  still  unnumbered,  un- 
charted, and  to  some  extent  unknown.  As  a  measure  of  the 
amount  of  fish  that  may  be  produced  from  parts  of  this  area  the 
Guano  Islands  off  the  coast  of  Chile  are  suggestive.  A  little 
group  of  bare  rocks,  in  a  rainless  sea,  called  the  Chincha  Islands 
were  for  a  long  time  inhabited  by  colonies  of  sea-birds  that 
roosted  and  nested  on  the  rocks  and  lived  on  the  fish  in  the  sur- 
rounding waters.  As  there  was  no  rain,  the  droppings  and 
remains  of  the  birds  accumulated  to  the  extent  of  many  millions 

*  Commerce  Report,  June  23  and  August  24,  1917. 


DISTANT  SUPPLIES  351 

of  tons  of  dry  matter,  which  actually  sold  as  Guano  during  the 
last  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  for  $600,000,000  in  gold.  If 
colonies  of  birds  can  continuously  catch  such  quantities  of  fish 
around  two  bare  little  rocks,  what  may  we  expect  from  the  world 
ocean  if  we  search  it  systematically  and  scientifically? 

As  an  interesting  example  of  one  faraway  unused  but  usable 
resource,  the  American  consul  at  Punta  Arenas  on  the  Straits 
of  Magellan  calls  attention  to  the  opening  for  a  cannery  to  use 
"the  centolla,  an  eight-footed  crustacean  resembling  the  crab. 
Its  flesh,  however,  is  much  more  delicate  and  of  finer  flavor  than 
that  of  either  the  crab  or  the  lobster." 

There  is  good  reason  to  believe  that  the  herring  resources  of 
the  Alaskan  coasts  are  quite  the  equal  of  those  of  the  similar 
coasts  of  Norway,  but  we  have  not  yet  needed  them  or  made 
any  serious  start  to  use  them. 

4.  FISH  CULTURE.  We  have  yet  the  last  resource,  one  which, 
indeed,  in  some  places  man  has  already  tried  with  great  suc- 
cess : — namely,  the  artificial  raising  of  fish  just  as  we  artificially 
raise  chickens. 

Many  centuries  ago  the  Chinese  and  Japanese  found  out  that 
fish  growing  in  ponds  and  rivers  is  one  of  the  easiest  ways  of 
getting  meat  in  a  densely  peopled  country.  Oyster  culture  was 
an  art  among  the  Japanese  a  century  before  the  declaration  of 
American  independence.  The  German  people  are  also  systematic 
fish  growers,  devoting  themselves  chiefly  to  the  carp,  a  fish  that 
can  be  fed  in  a  pond  like  poultry  in  a  yard.  There  are  many 
fish  growers'  associations  in  the  empire  and  the  total  area  of 
fish  ponds  approaches  two  hundred  thousand  acres.  In  Saxony 
one-half  of  one  per  cent,  of  the  area  is  covered  with  fish  ponds. 
(Compare  with  the  three  per  cent,  under  cultivation  in  Cuba, 
or  the  two  and  one-half  per  cent,  of  United  States  area  in  wheat 
in  1917.)  The  fish  are  fed  upon  corn,  vetches,  potatoes,  malt, 
snails,  slaughter-house  refuse,  and  many  other  foods.  The  aver- 
age yield  is  about  one  hundred  pounds  of  fish  per  acre  per  year 
and  much  higher  yields  are  sometimes  made.  But  this  is  the 
intensive  and  expensive  way.  It  is  cheaper  to  help  the  fish  take 
care  of  themselves. 

The  threatened  extermination  of  many  valuable  species  of  fish 
has  led  to  systematic  study  of  fish  by  the  government  of  the 


352  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

United  States  and  many  other  progressive  countries.  The  United 
States  Fish  Commission  began  by  investigating  the  life  history 
of  fish  so  that  it  might  recommend  to  Congress  the  methods  of 
restocking  our  almost  empty  streams.  These  investigations  soon 
brought  us  face  to  face  with  the  fact  that  the  best  way  to  restore 
fish  was  to  take  the  mature  eggs  from  the  fish,  artificially  hatch 
them,  then  care  for  the  young  during  the  weakest  period  of  their 
infancy  when  they  are  such  an  easy  prey  to  many  marauders, 
including  their  own  parents.  The  United  States  Fish  Com- 
mission now  hatches  billions  of  fish  eggs  each  year  and  releases 
the  fry  in  streams  and  lakes  to  replenish  the  supply.  There  are 
several  salmon  hatcheries  in  Oregon  and  Washington,  shad  hatch- 
eries in  the  Eastern  rivers,  lobster  hatcheries  upon  the  New  Eng- 
land coast ;  and  the  Great  Lakes  fisheries  receive  more  aid  in  this 
respect  than  any  other  locality.  The  governments  of  Canada, 
Norway,  Switzerland,  and  Germany  are  also  aiding  the  industry 
by  the  same  means. 

The  salmon,  although  a  sea  fish,  has  very  peculiar  habits  which 
in  some  cases  enable  private  individuals  to  hatch  them  for 
private  profit.  For  many  years  there  was  a  hot  dispute  among 
the  salmon  fishers  as  to  whether  the  young  salmon  did  or  did  not 
return  exclusively  to  the  stream  where  he  was  born.  Finally  the 
salmon  answered  it,  for  it  was  found  that  small  metal  tags  placed 
in  the  tail  of  an  eight-inch  fry  as  he  went  out  to  sea  in  autumn 
remained  until  he  returned  several  years  later  full  grown  to  the 
stream  of  his  nativity  to  breed.  Furthermore,  he  returned  to  no 
other  stream.  Thus  two  or  three  fishing  companies  operating  at 
the  mouth  of  the  river  can  safely  raise  young  salmon,  turn  them 
out  to  pasture  in  their  unknown  feeding  grounds  of  the  great 
deep,  sure  that  if  they  return  to  land  at  all  they  will  come  back 
to  be  caught  by  the  men  who  turned  them  loose. 

Thus  far  the  artificial  hatching  of  fish  has  been  chiefly  limited 
to  river  fish  and  some  of  the  more  easily  caught  river-running 
sea  fish  like  the  shad  and  the  salmon.  Scientists  know  how  to 
reproduce  the  fish  of  the  open  sea,  such  as  the  mackerel  or  that 
greatest  of  all  food  fish,  the  herring.  Thus  far  there  seems  to  be 
no  decrease  of  the  supply  which  would  indicate  the  need  of 
artificial  reproduction  of  these  species.  If  the  need  arises,  how- 
ever, artificial  reproduction  will  be  resorted  to.  We  do  not  yet 


THE  RANGE  CATTLE  OF  THE  SEA  858 

know  to  how  many  other  species  these  methods  may  be  applied, 
but  probably  to  nearly  all.  It  is  quite  conceivable  that  a  century 
or  two  hence  there  may  be  hundreds  or  even  thousands  of  com- 
bination fish  canneries,  fish  dryers,  and  fish  hatcheries,  shaded  by 
the  coconut  palm  trees  on  the  coral  atolls  of  the  Pacific  and 
Indian  oceans,  the  hatcheries  supported  by  the  same  inter- 
national organization  that  polices  the  world  sea  and  keeps  the 
world  peace.  There  are  interesting  elements  of  completeness 
about  this  picture.  The  coconuts  might  furnish  the  oil  for  fish 
canning.  The  fish  before  being  canned  would  give  up  their  eggs 
which  man  would  hatch  much  better  than  nature  would.  The 
lagoons  within  the  coral  islands  might  servo  sometimes  as  harbors 
for  fishing  vessels,  and  sometimes  as  storage-ponds  for  the  young 
fry  from  the  hatchery.* 

Still  another  element  of  completeness  is  furnished  by  the  very 
important  fact  that  agriculture  must  intensify  by  increase  of 
cost.  This  fish  culture  is  like  the  United  States  range  cattle 
business  of  1880 — man  turns  out  the  young,  and  nature  produces 
the  crop. 

The  impending  meat  scarcity  previously  described  is  not  so 
alarming  as  at  first  appears,  if  the  fish  supply  is  capable  of  in- 
definite expansion  with  small  increase  of  cost.  The  Japanese 
have  shown  us  that  a  nation  can  live  on  fish  instead  of  meat  with 
no  impairment  of  vigor. 

I  have  yet  to  mention  what  is  possibly  the  most  promising 
ultimate  source  of  sea  food,  perhaps  an  almost  unlimited  sup- 
ply— the  minute  forms  of  life  that  we  now  entirely  disregard. 
The  vast  mass  of  sea  life  is  called  plankton,  a  blanket  name  for 
hosts  of  species  of  small  plants  and  animals,  often  microscopic 
and  living  in  what  we  call  clear  sea  water.  Dr.  Robert  T. 
Morris  claims  that  plankton  also  is  edible. 

1  am  not  sure  whether  the  plankton  food  which  I  wrote  about  only 
half  seriously  would  be  used  as  soup,  vegetable,  or  meat.  As  a  matter 
of  fact  it  might  be  dried  and  used  in  various  ways,  but  different  waters 
at  various  times  would  furnish  different  groups  of  minute  algae  and 

*  I  must  add  that  this  is  not  orthodox.  The  scientists  of  the  Bureau 
of  Fisheries  point  out  that  the  tropic  fish  are  very  hard  to  catch.  But 
what  would  they  have  said  about  the  sardines  of  the  open  seas  in  1850? 


354  THE  FISH  SUPPLY 

infusoria  and  small  members  of  higher  forms.  In  the  north  I  have 
seen  the  surface  of  the  sea  so  full  of  pteropods  that  they  changed 
the  color  of  the  surface  of  the  sea.  Everything  from  whales  to  codfish 
were  feeding  upon  them  and  I  tried  them  prepared  in  two  or  three 
different  ways  and  found  them  first  rate. — Robert  T.  Morris,  letter  of 
March  27, 1919. 

A  thousand  years  from  now  many  of  the  neglected  mollusks  and  still 
lower  forms  of  animal  life  in  the  sea  will  be  served  in  the  form  of 
delicious  tempting  repast  upon  our  tables  .  .  .  The  relative  value 
between  sea  foods,  which  cost  man  little  or  nothing  to  raise,  and  land 
meat  which  costs  man  a  great  deal  to  raise,  show  no  considerable 
differences  excepting  in  the  large  fat  content  of  land  meat. — Robert  T. 
Morris  in  "A  Surgeon's  Philosophy." 

Alfred  G.  Mayor,  Marine  Laboratory  of  the  Carnegie  Insti- 
tution of  Washington,  one  of  the  leading  American  Marine 
Zoologists,  says  in  a  letter  of  April  10,  1919: 

There  is  of  course  an  immense  amount  of  good  food  in  the  ocean 
which  we  never  think  of  using.  Practically  all  of  the  minute  Crustacea 
are  probably  edible  and  we  need  only  to  strain  them  out  of  the  water  in 
order  to  obtain  them.  Most  of  these  forms,  however,  are  very  minute — 
less  than  Vs  of  an  inch  long.  Pteropods,  for  example,  rarely  are  Vi  of 
an  inch  in  length  and  are  translucent  creatures  with  thin  shells  of 
parchment-like  consistency.  See  "Depths  of  the  Ocean"  by  Sir  John 
Murray  and  J.  Hjort,  pp.  37,  309,  358-366,  372-377,  772-776. 


CHAPTER  XVI 
VEGETABLES,   PULSE,   AND   SMALL   FRUITS 

VEGETABLES  AND  GARDEN  PRODUCTS 

THE  people  of  America  have  just  discovered  garden  vegetables. 
For  a  few  decades  they  have  had  so  much  bread,  butter,  and 
meat,  lard,  fried  potatoes,  sugar,  and  coffee  that  they  scarcely 
felt  the  need  of  vegetables.  But  for  years  the  price  of  bread 
and  meat,  especially  meat,  has  been  rising.  Then  came  the  war, 
bringing  a  shortage  of  breadstuffs,  meat,  and  sugar,  and  also  of 
that  backbone  of  American  cookery,  fat  for  frying.  The  Ameri- 
cans turned  to  vegetables,  as  other  peoples  for  thousands  of 
years  have  done.  In  addition  to  rising  prices  and  shortage  of 
food  staples,  there  has  been  a  third  reason  why  America  may 
be  said  to  have  just  discovered  vegetables.  Experts  on  nutrition 
have  found  in  them  great  values  hitherto  unknown.  Vegetables, 
as  well  as  milk,  contain  the  mysterious  and  necessary  vitamines, 
especially  the  water  soluble  B,  but  also  in  some  cases  the  fat 
soluble  A  as  well. 

The  use  of  vegetables  depends  largely  on  the  relative  cost 
of  other  staples.  Where  men  are  scarce  and  land  is  plentiful, 
pork,  beef,  mutton,  potatoes,  and  bread  of  wheat  or  corn  abound. 
In  the  midst  of  such  plenty,  man  does  not  care  much  for  vegeta- 
bles. Where  bread  is  high  and  meat  is  scarce,  almost  to  the  van- 
ishing point,  man  eats  garden  vegetables,  which,  unlike  meat,  can 
be  produced  in  a  limited  space.  It  is  thus  plain  why  the  Jap- 
anese and  Chinese  use  more  vegetables  than  do  the  people  of 
Europe,  and  similarly  why  the  people  of  Europe  use  more  vege- 
tables than  do  the  people  of  the  United  States  and  Canada.  In 
the  future,  America  will  resemble  Europe  in  this  respect,  for 
both  economic  and  intellectual  reasons.  The  land  situation  in- 
dicates that  Americans  should  eat  more  vegetables;  the  Food 
Administration  recommends  the  changes;  and  the  dietitians 

855 


356       VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

agree.     The  first  and  last  of  these  incentives  will  be  perma- 
nent. 

Nearly  every  farm  has  a  vegetable  garden  and  some  plants 
are  cultivated  and  eaten  by  almost  every  people.  Owing  to 
the  large  yield  of  a  small  plot  of  ground  under  intensive  care, 
such  gardens  are  very  common  in  the  villages  and  small  towns 
of  both  Europe  and  America.  During  the  war  they  have  in- 
creased by  hundreds  of  thousands  in  every  trading  land  be- 
cause of  the  scarcity  of  staples,  the  cessation  of  trade,  and  the 
necessity  of  making  home  supplies  go  as  far  as  possible.  They 
have  very  greatly  added  to  the  food  supply  of  many  countries, 
have  given  many  city  people  an  agricultural  education,  improved 
the  quality  of  the  food  supply,  afforded  some  needed  exercise, 
and  yielded  a  surprising  cash  income.  School  gardens  have  long 
since  demonstrated  that  at  pre-war  city  retail  prices  a  child  can 
on  a  few  square  feet  produce  about  ten  cents'  worth  of  vege- 
tables per  square  foot  per  season  by  intensive  production. 

In  the  city  of  Gothenburg,  Sweden,  with  a  population  of 
180,000,  there  were  5,000  war  gardens  on  city  property  alone 
in  the  season  of  1918.  The  figures  of  war-garden  yield  help  to 
explain  the  difference  between  the  cost  of  living  in  the  city  and 
in  the  country  or  village,  where  a  family  with  a  garden  and 
poultry  can  live  on  a  surprisingly  small  cash  income.  Through 
the  food  and  income  from  this  source,  the  retired  farmer  of 
America  is  able  to  live  comfortably  without  regular  employ- 
ment in  a  country  town  on  a  cash  income  that  would  make  him 
a  starveling  or  an  artisan  in  a  city. 

In  the  European  and  American  gardens  are  to  be  found  many 
species  of  plants,  representing  in  their  origin  or  development 
every  continent  and  almost  every  country  in  the  world.  Many 
of  them  have  been  cultivated  until  they  bear  little  resemblance  to 
their  original  form.  Among  our  vegetables  Is  found  in  edible 
form  every  part  of  a  plant — roots,  leaf  stalks,  leaves,  blossoms, 
pods,  seeds,  stems,  both  above  ground  and  below  ground. 

THE   NITROGEN-PRODUCING   LEGUMES   OR  PULSE 

The  most  important  of  all  the  plants  which  we  commonly 
call  vegetables  is  the  group  of  legumes,  comprising  the  many 


A  FREE  GIFT  FROM  THE  AIR 


357 


kinds  of  peas  and  beans  called  pulse  in  the  Old  World.  These 
differ  from  all  other  vegetables  in  the  large  amount  of  protein 
or  nitrogenous  food,  meat  substitute,  which  they  contain.  (See 
table  of  food  analysis.)  Nitrogen,  as  food  for  man,  beast,  or 
plant,  is  expensive  to  buy,  yet  over  three-fourths  of  the  air  is 
nitrogen,  which,  owing  to  its 
chemical  inertness,  is  hard  to 
obtain  in  available  forms. 
Hence  its  high  cost  in  all  its 
forms,  whether  in  the  cow's 
food  as  cottonseed  meal, 
wheat  bran,  and  peanut  cake ; 
or  in  man's  food  as  meat, 
eggs,  milk,  and  cheese;  or  in 
the  plant's  food,  as  the  nitrog- 
enous fertilizers.  A  peculiar 
faculty  of  the  legumes  makes 
them  one  of  the  great  factors 
in  the  support  of  life  upon 
this  earth.  They  have  the 
ability,  great  for  the  present, 
and  greater  for  the  future, 
of  producing  upon  their  roots 
nodules  which  are  colonies 
of  the  microscopic  plants 
called  bacteria.  These  par- 
ticular organisms  catch  nitro- 
gen freely  from  the  air  and 
thus  enable  the  legumes  upon 
which  they  live  to  render  to 
mankind  a  service  of  incalculable  value  by  giving  nitrogenous 
food  for  man,  beast,  or  plant.  By  the  aid  of  these  bacteria  the 
legumes  can  grow  in  poor  soil  and  leave  it  the  richer  in  nitrogen 
because  of  the  nodules  on  the  roots  that  remain  in  the  ground. 

What  really  happens  is  that  the  bacteria  on  the  roots  of  clover 
catch  nitrogen  from  the  air,  the  clover  gets  it  from  the  bacteria, 
the  cow  gets  it  from  the  clover  and  turns  it  into  milk  and  meat, 
the  child  drinks  the  milk  and  grows.  In  addition,  the  legume 
enriches  the  ground  for  non-leguminous  plants  like  wheat,  which 


FIG  107. — Peanut  plant,  showing 
fruit,  nodules  of  nitrogen-gathering 
bacteria,  and  some  of  the  leaves  so 
much  prized  by  farm  animals. 
(U.  S  Dept.  Agr.) 


358      VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

may  follow  it,  so  the  nodules  are  partly  responsible  for  our  bread. 
Furthermore,  experiment  has  shown  that  in  mixed  stands  of 
legumes  and  non-leguminous  plants  the  non-leguminous  are 
richer  in  nitrogen  because  of  the  free  gifts  they  get  from  their 

immediate  plant 
neighbors,  who  seem 
to  conduct  a  free- 
lunch  counter  beneath 
the  earth.  If  planted 
in  sterile  soil  with- 
out the  inoculating 
germs  to  start  bac- 
terial growth,  the 
legumes  perish.  In 
ordinary  soils  where 
they  lack  the  germs 
they  grow  but  poorly, 
but  an  inoculated 
plant  becomes  several 
times  as  large  as  its 
uninoculated  and 
therefore  poverty- 
stricken  neighbor. 

The  pulse  plants  are 
represented  chiefly 
by  peas  in  northern 
climates  and  by  beans 
in  southern  climates. 


FIG.  108. — Top  of  a  soy  bean  plant  with 
an  unusually  large  crop.    (U.  S,  Dept.  Agr.) 


They  have  been  less  used  in  the  United  States  than  in  any  other 
civilized  country,  because  the  people  of  the  United  States  get 
their  nitrogenous  food  in  the  expensive  forms  of  meat,  cheese, 
and  milk,  of  which  they  use  more  per  person  than  does  any 
other  large  group  of  people. 

In  the  United  Kingdom,  before  the  potato  was  introduced, 
pulse  plants  were  more  important  than  they  now  are,  but  there 
are  several  thousand  acres  of  them  grown  each  year  and  thou- 
sands of  tons  of  peas  and  beans  were  regularly  imported  before 
the  war;  the  peas  chiefly  from  Canada,  half  of  the  beans 
from  Egypt  and  Manchuria.  During  the  war  the  British 


THE  PROTEIN  OF  THE  POOR  359 

meat  shortage  has  been  reflected  in  the  great  increase  of  pulse 
imports. 

IMPORTANCE   OF  PULSE  TO  POOR   PEOPLES 

The  pulse  plants  are  much  more  important  to  the  inhabitants 
of  the  Mediterranean  countries  than  to  the  richer  peoples 
of  northern  Europe.  The  lower  wages  and  the  scantier  re- 
sources of  the  Spaniards  and  Italians  make  it  impossible  for 
them  to  buy  meat  from  abroad,  as  do  the  British,  and  the 
dense  population,  combined  with  the  lack  of  grass,  make  it  im- 
possible to  rear  at  home  adequate  numbers  of  meat  animals. 
This  animal  shortage  is  very  pronounced.  Before  the  war,  Italy 
had  only  about  one-twentieth  as  many  sheep  as  the  United 
Kingdom  and  two-thirds  as  many  cattle,  and  Spain,  while  it 
has  as  many  sheep  per  million  people  as  the  United  Kingdom, 
has  not  one-thirtieth  as  many  cattle.  But  the  poverty  of  the 
Spanish  and  Italian  people  causes  them  normally  to  export 
some  of  the  little  meat  they  have,  whereas  rich  England,  with 
more  meat  animals,  is  the  heaviest  meat  importer  in  the  world. 
To  get  their  nitrogenous  food,  the  Spaniards,  Italians,  and  other 
peoples  of  the  Mediterranean  turn  therefore  to  the  cheaper  forms 
of  peas  and  beans.  The  gram  or  chick  pea  is  said  to  be  the 
leading  article  of  diet  in  Spain,  and  is  also  greatly  used  by  the 
peoples  of  Morocco,  Algeria,  and  Tunis,  whence  it  is  carried  by 
caravans  into  the  desert  in  exchange  for  dates.  The  European 
supply  of  this,  as  of  other  staples  of  food,  is  insufficient.  In 
1908,  Spain  imported  10,000  tons  from  Mexico  alone.  England 
imports  chick  peas  especially  for  making  soup,  while  France 
before  the  war  imported  no  less  than  35,000  tons  per  year  from 
northern  India.  During  the  war,  despite  the  reduction  of  her 
agriculture,  France  has  increased  her  crops  of  dried  beans.  Len- 
tils, vetch,  and  lupine,  other  pod-bearing  pulse  plants  some- 
what like  our  peas  and  beans,  are  grown  throughout  all  Medi- 
terranean countries.  From  the  Isle  of  Cyprus  there  is  con- 
siderable export  of  the  sugary  pods  of  the  carob  tree,  a  legume 
sometimes  called  locust,  which  is  said  to  have  been  the  food  of 
John  the  Baptist  in  the  Wilderness.  It  is  widely  used  as  a 
substitute  for  oats  for  horses  and  is  still  eaten  to  some  extent 
in  Mediterranean  lands. 


360      VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

As  the  people  of  the  United  States  are  able  to  buy  even  more 
meat  than  those  of  England,  they  use  less  pulse;  and  as  the 
people  of  England,  being  richer  than  the  peoples  of  the  Medi- 
terranean, use  less  pulse  than  their  southern  neighbors,  so  in 
their  turn  are  the  peoples  of  the  Mediterranean  richer  than  the 
hordes  who  occupy  southeastern  Asia.  To  the  latter,  accord- 
ingly, foods  of  the  pulse  family  are  a  necessity,  without  which 
the  people  would  perish.  Rice,  a  substitute  for  bread  and  pota- 
toes, is  deficient  in  nitrogen;  but  peas  and  beans  supply  this 
need.  In  India,  the  chief  among  many  legumes  is  the  lablab 
pea,  the  product  of  a  climbing  vine,  eaten  by  both  man  and 
beast. 

In  China  and  Japan  the  chief  dependence  is  the  soy  bean,  a 
nutritious  legume  with  three  times  as  much  protein  as  wheat. 
This  bean  is  as  new  in  American  dietary  as  the  areoplane  is 
in  transportation,  and  promises  to  be  as  revolutionary  in  its 
field.  The  enthusiastic  vegetarian  healer  of  men,  Dr.  J.  H. 
Kellogg,  praises  it  as  follows: 


Chemical  analysis  shows  in  its  composition  one-third  protein,  or 
more  than  is  found  in  beef,  and  one-fifth  its  weight  in  fat.  And  so 
the  soy  serves  the  Chinaman  for  both  beef  and  butter.  Another  point 
in  favor  of  the  soy  bean  is  the  fact  that  the  protein  which  it  contains 
is  a  complete  protein.  That  is,  it  is  capable  of  fully  supplying  the 
place  of  lean  meat,  milk  or  eggs.  It  is  for  this  reason  that  Chinese 
and  Japanese  are  able  to  prepare  from  the  soy  a  very  good  substitute 
for  milk.  A  very  fine  cheese  is  also  made  from  the  soy,  which  is  in 
many  respects  superior  to  ordinary  cheese. 

The  fat  or  oil  of  the  soy  is  of  excellent  flavor  and  is  more  easily 
digestible  than  animal  fats.  .  .  . 

A  few  months  ago  the  interesting  discovery  was  made  that  by  cooking 
the  bean  under  pressure  it  became  remarkably  tender  and  toothsome. 
A  temperature  of  about  225  degrees  F.  is  required  and  the  cooking  must 
be  continued  for  four  to  six  hours. 


This  student  of  American  health  is  not  giving  us  mere  per- 
sonal theory,  for  the  soy  bean  has  been  an  important  article  of 
diet  in  China  for  at  least  5,000  years — perhaps  for  50,000.  The 
Year  Book  of  the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture  for 
1917  (p.  106)  says: 


THE  WONDERFUL  SOY  BEAN  361 

In  Asiatic  countries,  especially  China  and  Japan,  the  soy  bean  and 
the  various  food  products  made  from  it  are  so  largely  consumed  that 
it  is  second  only  to  rice  in  importance  as  a  food  crop.  The  soy  bean  is 
eaten  to  only  a  very  small  extent  like  other  beans;  but  in  China  and 
Japan  it  is  elaborated  into  a  great  variety  of  products,  all  having  a 
high  percentage  of  protein  and  making  a  well-balanced  diet  when  eaten 
in  connection  with  the  staple  food,  rice.  Some  of  these  products  are 
said  to  be  eaten  at  every  meal  and  by  rich  and  poor  alike.  Of  these 
numerous  preparations,  only  one,  "  shoyu,"  or  "  soy  sauce,"  has  been 
introduced  to  any  extent  in  other  countries.  It  is  quite  possible  that 
some  of  these  products  would  appeal  to  the  American  taste  and  with 
proper  exploitation  become  established  on  the  American  market. 

Although  the  soy  bean  as  an  article  of  human  food  has  attracted  at- 
tention from  time  to  time  in  the  United  States,  thus  far  it  has  been  used 
but  little  except  as  a  special  food  for  invalids.  The  beans  contain  only 
a  trace  of  starch  and  are  highly  recommended  as  a  food  for  persons 
requiring  a  diet  of  low  starch  content. 

This  report  shows  the  fitness  of  the  soy  bean  to  join  with  rice 
in  making  a  balanced  diet,  rice  furnishing  starch  and  the  bean 
protein  and  fat — in  other  words,  bread,  butter,  and  meat.  The 
Year  Book  continues  its  praise  (pp.  108-10),  as  follows: 

When  properly  roasted  and  prepared,  the  dried  beans  of  any  of  the 
varieties  make  a  good  coffee  substitute.  Those  fond  of  cereal  beverages 
pronounce  it  equal  to  many  of  the  preparations  on  the  market. 

In  China  the  beans  are  soaked  in  water  and  roasted,  the  product 
being  eaten  after  the  manner  of  roasted  peanuts.  .  .  . 

When  soy  beans  are  three-fourths  or  more  grown,  the  seed  makes 
a  most  palatable  and  nutritious  green  vegetable.  As  such  it  may  be 
used  as  is  the  green  pea  or  the  lima  bean.  .  .  . 

If  the  dried  beans  (yellow  or  yellowish  green  varieties)  are  soaked 
for  a  few  hours,  then  finely  crushed  (as  in  a  meat  grinder)  and  boiled 
in  three  times  the  amount  of  water  as  of  bean  material  for  about  30 
minutes,  a  milky  emulsion  is  obtained  which  is  very  similar  in  ap- 
pearance and  properties  to  cow's  milk.  This  liquid,  separated  out  by 
means  of  a  very  fine  sieve  or  through  a  cloth  filter,  is  the  soy-bean  or 
"vegetable"  milk  used  so  extensively  in  China.  .  .  . 

This  "  vegetable  milk  "  can  be  used  successfully  in  numerous  prepara- 
tions, such  as  breads  and  cakes,  in  creaming  vegetables,  in  milk  choco- 
late, and  in  custards.  If  allowed  to  remain  in  a  warm  place  the  milk 
becomes  sour,  like  animal  milk,  and  in  that  form  may  be  employed  just 
as  is  sour  milk  or  butter-milk.  In  Japan  a  concentrated  or  condensed 
milk  is  obtained  by  evaporating  the  soy-bean  milk  in  a  vacuum.  This 
condensed  vegetable  milk,  though  not  so  light  in  color,  resembles  in 
nutritive  value  and  keeping  qualities  condensed  cow's  milk.  .  .  . 


362       VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

The  addition  of  magnesium  or  calcium  salts  (about  a  1%  solution) 
to  soy-bean  milk  when  hot  precipitates  some  of  the  proteid  substances, 
forming  a  grayish  white  curd  which  settles  out,  leaving  a  yellowish 
watery  liquid.  This  curd,  after  being  drained  and  pressed,  represents 
the  tofu,  or  bean  curd,  which  is  so  extensively  eaten  and  forms  the 
basis  of  numerous  unfermented,  smoked,  and  dried  cheeses  in  China  and 
Japan.  .  .  . 

Soy  or  shoyu  sauce  is  a  dark-brown  liquid  prepared  from  a  mixture 
of  cooked  and  ground  soy  beans,  roasted  and  pulverized  wheat  (bar- 
ley is  sometimes  used),  salt,  and  water.  This  mass  is  inoculated  with 


FIG.  109. — Soy  bean  curds  and  cheeses  in  a  Japanese  factory. 
(U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

a  culture  known  as  rice  ferment  and  left  in  casks  to  ferment  from  six 
months  to  a  year  or  sometimes  longer. 

In  odor  and  taste  this  sauce  suggests  a  good  quality  of  meat  extract, 
though  perhaps  more  salty  and  a  trifle  more  pungent.  Soy  sauce  is 
largely  consumed  by  the  Chinese  and  Japanese,  being  used  in  cooking 
and  as  a  relish  or  condiment  to  increase  the  flavor  and  palatibility  of 
the  diet.  This  product  may  well  serve  as  the  basis  of  sauces  of  the 
Worcestershire  type  and  as  a  flavor  with  many  American  vegetable 
dishes. 

The  manufacture  of  soy  sauce  is  conducted  on  a  large  scale  in  China 
and  Japan,  and  to  some  extent  in  India.  The  yearly  production  of 
Japan  is  said  to  amount  to  nearly  2,000,000  barrels.  The  brewing  of 
this  sauce  has  also  become  a  well-established  industry  in  Hawaii.  Al- 
though there  are  no  factories  in  the  United  States,  considerable  quan- 


A  METEOR  IN  TRADE  363 

titles  of  the  sauce  are  imported  annually,  and  it  can  be  obtained  at 
Chinese  stores  in  most  of  our  cities. 

The  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture  reports  satisfac- 
tory experiments  in  the  making  of  bread  in  which  white  flour  was 
mixed  with  one-third  to  one-half  soy-bean  flour,  thus  adding 
protein  and  making  a  loaf  with  the  combined  values  of  bread 
and  meat. 

If  some  one  is  inclined  to  say  that  too  much  space  has  been 
given  to  this  lowly  bean,  let  him  remember  that  it  is  a  great 
factor  in  the  lives  of  as  many  people  as  are  to  be  found  in  United 
States,  Canada,  Australia,  Britain,  France,  and  Italy.  Further- 
more it  was  hoary  with  age  when  Christopher  Columbus  set  forth 
upon  his  adventure. 

We  should  not  overlook  the  use  of  soy  oil  as  a  butter  substi- 
tute, as  discussed  in  the  last  chapter.  In  addition  to  all  these 
services,  the  soy  bean  in  the  Orient  fills  the  place  taken  by  our 
garden  beans  and,  moreover,  the  plant  is  a  field  crop  of  great 
importance.  For  example,  the  Manchuria  crop  of  1910  was 
estimated  at  1,500,000  tons,  of  which  1,127,000  tons  were  ex- 
ported, an  amount  one-half  as  great  as  the  United  States  wheat 
export  for  1911.  Korea  exported  $2,500,000  worth  in  1910, 
nearly  all  to  Japan.  The  growing  of  soy  beans  in  the  United 
States  has  increased  rapidly,  but  the  importation  during  the 
war  has  increased  much  more  rapidly.  Our  soy-bean  import  of 
2,000,000  pounds  in  1914  increased  to  5,000,000  in  1917 ;  that  of 
the  cake  from  3,000,000  to  11,000,000  and  of  oil  from  16,000,000 
to  162,000,000  pounds.  In  Manchuria  and  Korea  the  beans  have 
been  crushed  between  heavy  rollers  to  extract  the  oil,  and  the 
resulting  cake  has  for  centuries  been  carried  in  junks  to  Japan 
to  feed  cattle  or  to  be  used  as  fertilizer  by  the  Japanese  garden 
farmers.  Recent  British  experiments  have  shown  it  to  be  more 
economical  stock  food  than  linseed  cake  or  meal,  long  the  great 
staple  of  British  stock  feeding. 

The  suddenness  with  which  this  Oriental  farm  product  sprang 
into  importance  is  almost  startling,  and  shows  what  a  resource 
we  have  in  commerce  with  our  Mongolian  brother  when  a  recip- 
rocal relation  has  been  established.  The  trial  shipments  of  beans 
to  Europe  in  1907  were  followed  by  100,000  tons  in  1908,  245,000 


364      VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

tons  in  1909,  and  in  1910,  800,000  tons  to  England  alone. 
Although  Japan  does  not  grow  enough  beans  for  her  own  use, 
she  exports  many  beans,  for  she  serves  chiefly  as  a  gatherer  and 
sorter  for  the  products  of  North  China,  Korea,  and  Manchuria, 
whose  great  plain  is  the  one  important  piece  of  undeveloped 
agricultural  land  in  eastern  Asia.  The  best  bean  lands  there 
yield  thirty  bushels  of  seed  to  the  acre. 

The  plant  is  easily  grown  and  is  at  home  in  the  whole  of  our 
cotton-belt,  also  in  regions  of  low  rainfall  beyond  it  and  in  the 
corn-belt  to  the  north  of  it.  Eight  thousand  acres  were  grown 
in  Vermont  in  1918.  It  is  making  rapid  advance  in  American 
agriculture.  The  meat  shortage  due  to  the  war  has  brought  it 
into  prominence  and  has  shown  its  great  possibilities.  It  has 
been  selling  at  prices  regularly  two  or  three  times  the  cost  of 
production  under  good  conditions.  In  1918  the  price  was  even 
higher,  so  keen  was  the  demand.  Its  use  as  a  food  for  both  man 
and  beast  may  be  expected  greatly  to  increase.  Experiments 
have  shown  it  to  be  so  superior  to  our  favorite  navy  bean  as 
food  that  it  may  in  time  largely  replace  this  staple  of  New 
York  agriculture  and  New  England  diet. 

The  food  alarm  of  1917  and  the  campaign  for  increased  pro- 
duction showed  greater  results  in  the  pulses  than  in  any  other 
important  food  crop  save  peanuts.  Between  1916  and  1917  the 
bean  acreage  of  Maine  increased  from  11,000  to  33,000  acres; 
that  of  Colorado  from  38,000  to  190,000  acres;  that  of  Michigan, 
from  470,000  to  690,000  acres;  that  of  California,  from  340,000 
to  558,000  acres,  and  the  crop  was  worth  $60,000,000.  The  total 
American  acreage  in  one  year  jumped  from  1,100,000  to  1,830,- 
000,  with  a  crop  sufficient  to  furnish  some  export  and  to  break 
the  market  the  ensuing  spring. 

The  dried  beans  of  America  are  grown  in  three  regions:  one 
in  western  New  York,  and  one  in  central  Michigan,  in  locali- 
ties where  the  climate  is  a  little  too  cool  for  corn,  so  that  the 
bean  is  cultivated  in  its  stead.  The  third,  a  region  of  great 
importance,  is  in  southern  California,  where  it  is  too  dry  for 
corn.  It  should  be  noted  that  the  greatest  increases  in  bean 
acreage  were  in  regions  outside  the  corn-belt,  for  both  crops  re- 
quire horses,  plows,  and  cultivators  at  the  same  time.  There 
is  no  reasonable  limit  to  the  number  of  beans  that  might  be 


THE  PEANUT  ARRIVES  365 

produced  if  the  demand  for  them  should  result  in  prices  rela- 
tively higher  for  them  than  for  some  other  staples.  In  large 
areas  in  the  southern  part  of  the  United  States,  a  crop  of  beans 
can  be  grown  the  same  year  on  the  same  ground  as  corn.  Beans 
can  (if  needed)  be  grown  for  export  over  large  areas  in  the 
tropics  where  they  are  now  grown  only  for  home  consumption. 
Thus  Brazil,  under  the  stimulus  of  war  prices,  exported  63,000 
tons  of  beans,  worth  $7,000,000,  during  the  first  six  months  of 
1917,  although  in  all  her  history  she  had  never  exported  beans 
before. 

In  the  discussion  of  pulse  we  should  never  lose  sight  of  the 
peanut,  which  we  discussed  in  the  chapter  on  Edible  Fats,  be- 
cause of  its  fat  content,  but  which  has  in  addition  to  its  forty- 
five  per  cent,  of  fat  about  thirty  per  cent,  of  protein,  more  than 
twice  the  amount  in  wheat  flour.  The  peanut  really  is  a  legume 
and  a  bean  despite  its  name.  The  use  of  this  plant  is  increas- 
ing even  more  rapidly  than  the  use  of  dried  beans.  The 
acreage  in  Texas  jumped  from  20,000  to  200,000  between  1916 
and  1917,  partly  because  of  the  price  rise  and  partly  because  the 
cotton  boll  weevil  had  destroyed  cotton  crops.  For  a  long  time 
the  peanut  was  merely  an  extra  to  be  eaten  at  the  circus  and 
other  unmannerly  places,  but  it  is  rapidly  advancing  (as  diet 
changes  go)  toward  a  place  of  importance  in  the  American 
dietary.  It  appears  on  our  tables  in  the  form  of  salted  peanuts, 
and  ground  into  paste  called  peanut  butter,  which  is  increasing 
in  favor  as  a  meat  substitute.  The  United  States  Department  of 
Agriculture  recommends  that  peanuts  be  mixed  with  white  flour, 
one-third  to  one-half,  to  make  bread.  Dietary  experts  give  them 
a  high  place,  saying  that  they  need  only  inorganic  salts  and  fat 
soluble  vitamines  to  make  them  a  sustaining  food.  Its  possi- 
bilities are  enormous  in  the  agriculture  of  the  American  South, 
where  it  is  entirely  at  home  in  large  areas  of  sandy  soil  of  low 
fertility  that  will  not  grow  grain  or  grass  to  good  advantage. 
As  with  corn,  there  is  no  danger  of  overproduction.  If  the 
supply  overreaches  the  direct  demand,  we  have  the  ever-increas- 
ing demand  of  the  pig,  who  loves  to  root  up  peanuts  and  pass 
their  protein  and  fat  on  to  us  in  other  and  better-known  forms. 
One  of  these  is  the  famous  Smithfield  ham,  which  derives  part 
of  its  merit  from  the  fact  that  the  porkers  finish  the  harvest  of 


366       VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

the  Virginia  peanut  crop  in  their  progress  toward  the  ham  sack. 
The  fact  that  the  value  of  the  peanut  crop  rose  from  $12,000,000 
in  1908  to  $56,000,000  in  1916,  suggests  future  value  of  billions, 
if  the  scarcity  of  animals  makes  it  necessary  for  us  to  eat  our 
protein  from  direct  rather  than  indirect  sources. 

The  qualities  of  the  other  vegetables  are  less  impressive  than 
those  of  the  pulses.  No  non-leguminous  vegetable  can  rival  the 
pea  and  bean  in  nutritive  content.  Most  of  them  are  largely 
water;  many  of  them  containing  more  water  than  is  to  be  found 
in  milk,  and  some  of  them,  such  as  the  turnip  and  watermelon, 
are  ninety-five  per  cent,  moisture.  Despite  this  poverty  in 
calories,  we  could  not  get  along  without  them  and  they  promise 
to  become  much  more  valuable  to  us  in  a  more  rational  future. 
It  is  through  them  that  we  get  a  number  of  mineral  salts,  with- 
out which  we  could  not  exist.  They  furnish  acids,  flavoring, 
tonics,  stimulants,  and  regulators,  and  aid  in  digestion  of  other 
foods.  They  are  great  carriers  of  the  indispensable  vitamines 
and  they  furnish  woody  fiber,  another  element  of  the  human 
diet  to  which  science  has  recently  given  a  high  place,  on  the 
theory  that  the  human  animal  ought  to  have  food  resembling 
that  for  which  he  was  by  nature  intended.  There  is  important 
evidence  to  prove  that  man  originally  ate  fruits,  nuts,  and  per- 
haps also  meat.  Certainly  he  was  accustomed  to  much  coarse 
vegetable  fiber  which  our  modern  diet  of  bread,  meat,  dairy 
products,  and  sugar  lacks,  and  which  beets,  turnips,  parsnips, 
radishes,  spinach,  celery,  lettuce,  cabbage,  and  all  other  green 
vegetables  contain.  It  is  claimed  by  Dr.  Irving  Fisher,  of  Yale, 
that  we  need  at  least  an  ounce  of  this  fiber  per  day. 

Some  Sicilians  have  lived  for  generations  on  corn-meal  prod- 
ucts, plus  an  abundance  of  green  vegetables  and  oil.  This  diet  of 
corn  and  greens  closely  resembles  the  horse's  diet;  it  really  con- 
sists of  his  grain  and  a  little  of  his  hay.  The  Chinese  even  more 
closely  resemble  the  horse,  in  their  practice  of  using  alfalfa  tips 
as  a  vegetable.  Persons  familiar  with  the  dietary  of  working 
men  in  the  Southern  States  of  the  United  States  have  often  ob- 
served the  great  importance  these  people  attach  to  cabbages  and 
spring  "greens"  from  the  fields,  which  are  of  value  for  their 
bulk,  mineral  salts,  and  vitamines,  especially  in  connection  with 
the  Southern  mainstay  of  corn  bread  and  fat  pork. 


CLIMATE  AND  THE  VEGETABLE  TRADE          367 

THE   COMMERCE   IN   VEGETABLES 

On  account  of  the  large  bulk  and  perishable  nature  of  fresh 
vegetables,  they  have  been  unimportant  in  commerce  until  the 
recent  improvements  in  transportation  made  it  possible  to  carry 
perishable  stuff  a  long  distance.  Owing  to  the  fact  that  statistics 
of  domestic  trade  in  America  are  hard  to  get,  Europe  gives  us 
the  best  opportunity  to  see  the  magnitude  of  the  present  com- 
merce in  these  products.  In  the  United  Kingdom  alone  the 
importation  amounted  to  from  $60,000,000  to  $70,000,000  per 
year  before  the  war.  In  addition  to  this  there  is  a  lively  local 
trade  between  south  and  southwest  England  and  the  Channel 
Islands,  and  the  colder  parts  of  that  country.  The  Channel 
Islands  (in  the  English  Channel,  near  the  French  coast)  have 
a  relatively  mild  climate,  because  surrounded  by  a  comparatively 
warm  ocean.  Their  crops,  therefore,  mature  early  and  they 
are  able  to  grow  those  usually  found  further  south ;  these  newer 
garden  crops  arc  offering  severe  competition  to  the  islands'  old 
specialty  of  dairying.  Daily  steamers  now  take  large  quantities 
of  garden  stuffs,  grapes,  small  fruit,  and  flowers  to  the  English 
cities.  Other  islands  share  this  advantage,  such  as  the  Azores, 
Madeiras,  and  Canaries,  where  fertile  but  unfortunately  small, 
hilly,  and  volcanic  areas  in  a  frostless  climate  right  in  the  path- 
way of  South  African  and  South  American  steamers  give  market 
opportunity  which  is  far  better  than  their  producing  oppor- 
tunity. The  high  prices  of  midwinter  vegetables  and  fruits 
make  these  islands  push  every  acre  to  an  extreme  limit  of  pro- 
duction for  this  exotic  trade.  Most  of  the  vegetables  imported 
into  Britain  come  from  the  south  of  France,  Spain,  and  Italy, 
at  whose  coasts  English  steamers  stop.  The  whole  region  north 
of  the  Alps  receives  large  quantities  of  these  southern  products. 
Especially  favored  are  the  shore  plains  facing  the  Mediterranean 
and  protected  from  the  north  by  mountains,  such  as  the  Spanish 
plains  near  Cadiz,  Malaga,  and  Valencia,  where  irrigation  and 
flood  plains  give  opportunity  for  the  most  intensive  garden- 
farming.  France  has  a  large  traffic  in  early  vegetables  from 
her  warm  colony  of  Algeria,  sheltered  from  the  cold  north  winds 
by  the  waters  of  the  Mediterranean.  Egypt's  sunny  climate  is 
of  value  on  account  of  the  80,000  (1910)  tons  of  early  onions 


368      VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

she  exports  between  March  and  May  to  Liverpool,  London,  Hull, 
Hamburg,  Trieste,  and  even  the  United  States. 


RESEMBLANCE   OF  FLOWER  AND  VEGETABLE   INDUSTRY 

Before  the  war,  the  French  had  a  flower  industry  so  closely 
akin  to  vegetable  growing  in  its  economic  and  climatic  aspects 
that  it  merits  mention  here.  Every  night  during  the  winter 
months  the  "Cut  Flower  Limited  Express"  picked  up  ten  car- 
loads of  flowers  along  the  Mediterranean  coast  between  Nice  and 
Toulon  for  delivery  in  car-loads  to  Paris,  Frankfort-on-the- 
Main,  Munich,  Berlin,  Vienna,  St.  Petersburg,  London,  and  Man- 
chester, via  Calais.  This  industry  began  about  1880  and  had 
made  such  progress  that  before  the  war  a  single  commune 
(Hyeres)  had  in  its  sheltered  plain  between  the  mountains  and 
the  Mediterranean  3,000  irrigated  acres  on  which  nearly  6,000 
persons  were  busy  raising  violets  to  sell  between  November  and 
March. 

The  war  has,  of  course,  greatly  disturbed  all  this  vegetable 
industry,  chiefly  through  the  congestion  of  the  railroads  of 
France  and  Spain  and  the  shortage  of  ships.  As  a  result,  Eng- 
land has  greatly  increased  her  garden  acreage  each  year  of  the 
war.  Disturbances  in  this  trade  wrought  interesting  changes 
in  Dutch  agriculture.  The  acreage  of  grain  showed  a  slight  de- 
cline, but  there  was  a  high  increase  in  the  production  .of  beets 
for  cattle  and  potatoes  for  man.  The  acreage  of  peas  and  beans 
was  increased  nearly  fifty  per  cent.,  but  there  was  a  more  than 
compensating  decline  in  the  amount  of  land  devoted  to  seeds 
for  export,  such  as  mustard,  poppy,  and  canary  seed.  On  the 
whole,  export  movements  were  curtailed  and  intensive  food  crops 
were  increased  in  all  western  European  countries. 

THE   AMERICAN   TRADE  IN   VEGETABLES 

In  the  United  States  the  foreign  trade  in  vegetables  and  gar- 
den products  is  no  index  of  their  importance.  Trade  between 
different  states  in  Europe  is  foreign,  but  similar  trade  between 
the  states  of  America  is  domestic  and  hence  not  covered  by 
statistics. 


THE  AMERICAN  VEGETABLE  TRADE  369 

Fifty  years  ago  each  town  and  city  depended  upon  its  imme- 
diate locality  for  vegetables,  and  there  is  still  a  large  area  near 
almost  every  city  where  farmers  grow  fields  of  peas,  beans,  cab- 
bages, and  other  garden  crops  to  sell.  The  vegetables  from 
these  market  gardens  are  usually  consumed  in  the  nearby  mar- 
ket in  the  season  of  ripening,  but  months  before  the  local  supply 
is  ready  similar  products  are  sold  in  the  city  market.  The  best 
are  produced  in  nearby  hot-houses,  but  the  great  bulk  is  brought 
by  the  refrigerator  car,  express  freight,  and  the  coasting  steamer, 
which  make  possible  the  purchase  of  almost  any  vegetable  any 
week  in  the  year  in  all  the  large  American  cities.  In  emancipat- 
ing the  city  from  dependence  on  local  fields,  these  transportation 
facilities  have  caused  the  development  of  an  enormous  trucking 
industry  in  rather  concentrated  areas  throughout  the  whole 
length  of  the  Atlantic  Plain,  from  the  eastern  end  of  Long 
Island  to  the  tip  of  Florida,  and  also  in  scattered  localities  from 
Alabama  to  Texas.  So  important  has  this  traffic  become  that 
sometimes  a  passenger  train  full  of  millionaires  bound  for  Flor- 
ida has  to  take  a  siding  while  an  express  freight  loaded  with 
cabbage,  lettuce,  and  tomatoes  rushes  north. 

VEGETABLE   PRODUCTION   ON   THE   ATLANTIC    PLAIN 

The  Atlantic  Plain  is  a  nearly  level  area  lying  between  the 
Atlantic  Ocean  and  the  first  stratum  of  hard  rock  that  limits 
the  sands  and  clays  of  the  plain.  This  dividing  layer  of  rock 
extends  in  a  nearly  straight  line  from  New  York  southwestward 
through  the  cities  of  Trenton,  Philadelphia,  Baltimore,  Wash- 
ington, Richmond,  Raleigh,  North  Carolina,  and  Columbia,  South 
Carolina.  This  plain,  largely  composed  of  sandy  soil,  is  one  of 
the  least  developed  parts  of  the  United  States.  Much  of  it  is 
still  in  pine  forests  *  because  the  sandy  soil  contains  little  plant 
nutrition  and  when  first  cleared  is  unsuited  to  the  growth  of 
grain  or  of  grass.  Fortunately,  however,  in  this  sandy  soil  will 
grow  excellent  peas,  melons,  cabbages,  strawberries,  etc.,  which 
can  be  planted  and  harvested  much  earlier  on  light  sandy  soil 
than  on  heavy  clay  soil,  since  the  latter  does  not  dry  so  quickly 

•The  wild  deer  lives  within  fifteen  miles  of  New  York  City,  on  land 
smooth  enough  to  permit  the  easy  use  of  agricultural  machinery. 


370      VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

nor  get  so  warm  as  sand.  Thus  the  Atlantic  Plain  has  an  advan- 
tage over  the  nearby  Piedmont  and  Appalachian  districts,  with 
their  fertile  but  heavy  clays. 

The  advantage  of  sandy  soils  for  garden  products  is  shown 
by  the  practice  of  some  New  Jersey  growers,  who  harvest  on 
the  same  field  a  pea  crop  on  June  1,  a  cantaloupe  crop  on  August 
15,  and  turnips  on  October  1,  and  at  the  same  time  have  the 


FlO.  110. — This   industry  is  scattered  by  local  city  markets  and  special 
agricultural  conditions.     (Finch  and  Baker.) 


land  well  set  in  crimson  clover,  a  legume  which  gathers  nitro- 
gen and  makes  humus  when  plowed  under  the  next  April  or 
May.  Another  New  Jersey  truck  combination  is  Canada  peas 
picked  in  May  and  June,  followed  by  a  crop  of  corn  with  a 
legume  side  crop  of  vetch,  cowpeas,  or  crimson  clover  to  fertil- 
ize the  earth.  These  are  not  common  practices.  They  are  ex- 
ceptions, showing  the  effects  of  energy  and  intelligence  applied 
to  land  most  of  which  is  not  utilized. 

From  the  southern  part  of  this  sandy  Atlantic  Plain  comes 
throughout  the  cooler  part  of  the  year  a  procession  of  vegetable 
products  that  follows  the  advance  of  the  seasons. 

When  October's  breath  of  winter  turns  the  fields  of  New  Jer- 


THE  ADVANCE  OF  THE  SEASONS 


371 


sey  and  Long  Island  brown,  the  huckster  and  the  groceryman 
of  the  Northern  cities  begin  to  sell  beans,  lettuce,  eggplants,  and 
cucumbers  from  southern  Florida,  and  at  Christmas  come  straw- 
berries, which  New  Jersey  can  produce  only  in  May  and  June. 
The  Florida  truck  farmer  often  has  a  rapid  rotation  of  crops. 
A  typical  farmer  ships  heads  of  lettuce  in  January ;  immediately 
sets  the  ground  to  tomato  plants,  which  he  ships  in  March; 


FIG.  111. — Planting  zones  for  vegetables  in  the  eastern  half  of  the 
United  States  This  gardener's  guide  shows  how  we  can  have  green 
things  from  South  Florida  all  winter— if  they  don't  have  an  unusually 
cold  day.  (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

then  plants  potatoes  for  shipment  in  May,  while,  through  the 
summer,  the  velvet  bean,  a  rapidly  growing  legume  of  the  tropics, 
makes  food  for  his  mules  and  leaves  nitrogen  in  the  soil  for 
the  crops  of  the  succeeding  winter. 

The  truck  harvest  follows  the  spring  in  its  advance  north- 
ward. After  the  supplies  of  Florida  come  those  from  Savannah, 
Georgia ;  then  the  Charleston,  South  Carolina,  district,  including 
the  nearby  islands,  have  their  turn,  followed  by  New  Berne  and 
Wilmington  in  eastern  North  Carolina,  while  Norfolk,  Virginia, 
with  steamboats  running  to  Washington,  Baltimore,  Philadel- 
phia, New  York,  and  Boston,  is  one  of  the  greatest  trucking 


372      VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

centers  of  the  United  States.  This  port  ships  enormous  quanti- 
ties of  early  potatoes  and  strawberries  to  the  Northern  cities, 
until  the  peninsula  between  the  Chesapeake  Bay  and  the  sea, 
known  as  the  "Eastern  Shore,"  takes  its  turn.  This  peninsula, 
with  railroads  on  the  land,  with  its  ramification  of  navigable 
bays  and  estuaries,  has  one  of  the  finest  systems  of  transporta- 
tion and  is  one  of  the  best  agricultural  districts  of  the  United 
States.  Lastly  comes  the  heavy  shipment  of  truck  crops  from 
the  fields  of  southern  and  eastern  New  Jersey,  Long  Island,  and 
the  smaller  areas  near  the  New  England  manufacturing  cities. 

The  bulky  nature  of  products  of  this  class  gives  a  great  advan- 
tage to  the  producer  who  can  haul  the  crop  to  market  in  his  own 
wagon.  Hence  there  is  a  much  greater  concentration  of  pro- 
duction near  the  larger  cities,  especially  within  a  thirty-mile 
radius  of  Philadelphia,  where  good  truck  land  is  within  easy 
reach  of  city  market. 

The  truck  crops  grown  for  distant  markets  usually  come  from 
centers  with  marked  localization  of  production.  It  requires 
accurate  knowledge  to  grow  and  to  pack  crops  in  the  best  way; 
hence  where  strawberries  or  tomatoes  or  celery  are  grown,  there 
the  people  know  the  best  method,  and  the  seed,  plants,  fertilizer, 
and  baskets  can  be  had  to  the  best  advantage.  There  the  buyers 
come,  and  above  all  full  carloads  can  there  be  shipped,  even 
though  many  growers  combine  to  make  them.  The  full  carload 
shipment  is  essential  to  long-distance  truck  business.  The  full 
carload  goes  straight  through;  the  shipment,  less  than  a  car- 
load, is  often  transferred  a  time  or  two.  The  full  car  may  go 
to  market  in  forty-eight  hours,  whereas  the  smaller  shipment, 
at  a  higher  freight  rate,  might  take  three  days  or  a  week.  This 
centralization  is  very  marked  in  Florida,  where  the  traveler  will 
pass  for  many  miles  through  almost  unbroken  pine  forests,  then 
come  out  upon  a  settlement  where  scores  of  farmers  are  busy 
growing  one  or  two  vegetable  crops.  Then  the  train  plunges  on 
into  the  forest,  until  many  miles  away  it  comes  to  another  truck 
center,  where  the  farmers,  by  clustering,  greatly  increase  their 
opportunity  of  profit. 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  CLIMATE 


THE  INFLUENCE   OF   CLIMATE 


378 


The  price  of  the  vegetables  varies  from  season  to  season, 
indicating  that  the  business  is  uncertain.  The  earliest  products 
on  the  market  bring  the  best  returns ;  hence  the  truck  grower  al- 
ways tries  to  be  as  early  as  he  can,  and  therefore  is  in  constant 
danger  from  the  frost.  A  promising  harvest  may  be  blackened 
by  frost,  which  may  occur  in  almost  any  truck  season  some- 
where along  the  United  States  Atlantic  coast,  causing  damage 


CABBAGE 

ION  FARMS  REPORTING  ONE  ACRE  OR  MORE) 

ACREAGE.   I9O9 


FIG.  112. — Our  most  slaple  green  food  has  a  widely  distributed  production. 
(O.  E.  Baker,  Year  Book  of  U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

measured  by  hundreds  of  thousands,  or  even  millions,  of  dollars. 
In  some  seasons  the  growers  in  some  districts  of  Florida  have 
planted  the  same  crop  four  times  in  succession,  and  then  made 
money,  but  at  best  the  business  is  precarious.  Rains  and  cool 
weather  in  one  section  at  times  retard  the  development  of  the 
plants,  causing  the  produce  of  two  or  three  great  centers  to 
mature  at  the  same  time  and  to  supply  more  than  the  market 
demands;  in  that  event  the  price  may  go  down  to  the  point 
where  the  shipments  are  not  worth  the  freight  charges. 


374       VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

THE   VEGETABLE   INDUSTRY   OF  THE    MISSISSIPPI   VALLEY 

Chicago  and  the  central  part  of  the  United  States  draw  off- 
season supplies  partly  from  certain  sandy  districts  in  Tennes- 
see, Mississippi,  northeastern  Texas,  and  southern  Texas  on  the 
Gulf  Plain  near  the  mouth  of  the  Rio  Grande.  In  the  main 
these  central  trucking  districts  duplicate  the  products  of  the 
Atlantic  Plain,  but  the  Rio  Grande  district  is  developing  a 
specialty  of  onions,  and  southern  Georgia  makes  enormous  ship- 
ments of  watermelons  in  the  early  summer  after  the  Florida 
supply  is  in  and  before  the  Maryland  crop  is  ripe. 

THE    CALIFORNIA   VEGETABLE   INDUSTRY 

The  open  winter  of  California  gives  that  state  an  important 
vegetable  industry,  which  probably  reaches  its  highest  develop- 
ment on  the  reclaimed  delta  lands  ("tules")  at  the  mouths  of 
the  San  Joaquin  and  Sacramento  rivers.  These  deltas  are  espe- 
cially suitable  for  the  production  of  asparagus,  which  is  grown 
in  fields  of  a  thousand  acres ;  it  is  shipped  to  the  Atlantic  States, 
and  also  canned.  A  great  disadvantage  to  the  California  trucker 
is  the  long  distance  and  high  freight  rates  to  the  Eastern  mar- 
kets; nevertheless,  350,000  tons  were  shipped  in  1916.  Freight 
rates  are  less  of  a  deterrent  to  traffic  in  dried  beans,  concen- 
trated and  non-perishable,  which  are  grown  in  great  quantities 
on  the  semi-arid  lands  near  the  sea  in  southern  California. 

AMERICAN   FOREIGN   TRADE   IN   VEGETABLES 

The  building  of  a  new  railroad  through  the  whole  length  of 
Florida  and  out  across  the  coral  keys  to  the  island  city  of  Key 
West,  where  it  connects  with  car  ferries  to  Havana,  gives  the 
frost-free  fields  near  Havana  a  chance  to  compete  with  the 
truck  districts  of  the  United  States.  This  competition  has  been 
the  cause  of  bitter  complaint  by  Florida  growers,  who  pay  more 
for  the  carriage  of  their  product  from  Tampa  to  Chicago 
than  the  Cuban  pays  for  similar  freight  from  Havana  to  Chicago 
via  Tampa.  To  get  the  Cuban  goods,  the  road  must  bid  low 
against  New  Orleans,  and  to  make  up  its  profits  it  charges  a 


THE  ORIENTAL  DIET  OF  VEGETABLES  375 

high  rate  to  the  Tampa  shipper,  who  has  no  alternative.  Porto 
Rico  also  exports  some  vegetables  to  the  United  States.  Other 
West  Indian  and  Caribbean  regions  have  excellent  resources  for 
these  crops,  but  as  yet  lack  marketing  facilities,  a  condition  of 
affairs  that  was  until  recently  found  also  in  Porto  Rico,  where 
the  vegetable  growers  and  the  steamship  lines  each  quite  natur- 
ally waited  for  the  other  to  begin.  The  European  and  American 
trade  in  vegetables  is  a  luxury,  relatively  small  in  the  world's 
trade,  and  small  in  the  life  of  the  people  who  consume  this  food. 
It  is  a  phase  of  the  high  standard  of  life  of  rich  people.  To  see 
vegetables  performing  their  greatest  function,  we  need  to  go 
to  China  and  Japan,  although  there  the  trade  is  chiefly  local 
because  of  the  small  use  of  the  railroad  and  the  steamship,  and 
the  dependence  of  the  farmer  on  his  own  household  industries 
and  of  the  city  upon  its  immediate  environs.  To  the  Chinaman 
peas  and  beans,  cabbage  and  greens,  and  a  host  of  other  vege- 
tables play  a  dietary  role  of  which  we  have  little  conception. 
These  people  are  the  most  skilful  gardeners  in  the  world,  grow- 
ing dozens  and  dozens  of  vegetables  of  which  we  have  never 
heard  and  cultivating  the  land  with  an  intensity  which  we  shall 
not  reach  until  our  population  has  many  times  increased.  Three 
or  four  or  five  crops  a  season  are  not  uncommon,  and  two  or 
three  crops  on  the  same  ground  at  the  same  time  is  a  wide- 
spread practice,  but  one  that  can  be  followed  only  with  arduous 
labor.  Cucumbers  and  other  running  vines  which  we  permit 
to  sprawl  over  our  gardens  are  by  the  Chinese  made  to  climb 
up  on  poles,  thus  saving  space.  The  robber  agriculture  of  the 
West  depends  upon  commercial  fertilizer  gathered  from  the  ends 
of  the  earth,  freshly  supplied  each  year  and  eventually  sent  off 
to  the  sea  as  sewage,  but  the  Chinese  have  for  4,000  years 
supported  educated  men  and  an  established  civilization  on  the 
same  patches  of  ground,  which  are  kept  in  high  fertility  by  the 
careful  return  to  it  of  everything  that  has  been  taken  from  it. 
Human  as  well  as  animal  excrements  are  carefully  saved  for 
fertilizer  and  laboriously  applied  to  the  crops,  usually  in  a  liquid 
form  and  often  poured  at  the  root  of  each  plant  with  a  dipper. 
Instead  of  spending  millions  to  dispose  of  sewage,  the  foreign 
settlements  of  Shanghai  sell  it  for  $30,000  of  gold  per  year  to 
contractors  who  carry  it  away  in  boats  at  night  to  fertilize  the 


376      VEGETABLES,  PULSE,  AND  SMALL  FRUITS 

delta  of  the  Yangtse-Kiang,  which  in  some  places  supports  as 
many  as  3,600  agricultural  people  per  square  mile. 

The  future  supply  of  vegetables,  which  in  America  and  Europe 
is  capable  of  indefinite  increase,  will  be  discussed  in  the  chapter 
on  Canning. 


SMALL  FRUITS 

Classed  with  vegetables  in  their  growth,  marketing,  and  die- 
tary use,  is  the  group  of  small  fruits — strawberries,  raspberries, 
blackberries,  gooseberries,  and  currants.  All  the  ordinary  vege- 
tables of  the  garden  are  annuals.  All  of  these  small  fruits  re- 
quire at  least  two  seasons  for  their  fruiting;  but  if  once  started 
they  will  live  in  the  same  location  for  many  years.  The  rasp- 
berry, blackberry,  and  strawberry  send  up  fresh  shoots  each 
year  for  next  year's  fruit,  while  the  currant  and  the  gooseberry 
establish  enduring  bushes  that  last  for  many  years.  The  growth 
and  marketing  of  these  crops  respond  to  the  same  influences 
that  control  the  growth  of  other  garden  stuff.  They  often  form 
a  part  of  the  farm  or  village  garden ;  and,  where  vegetables  are 
grown  wholesale,  they  also  are  likely  to  be  found  occupying 
whole  fields.  As  is  the  case  with  the  other  truck  crops,  they 
do  well  on  sandy  soil,  which  tends  to  make  a  small  plant  of 
fruitful  habit  rather  than  one  with  large  growth  of  stalk.  Like 
vegetables,  they  are  usually  grown  in  centers,  such,  for  example, 
as  the  strawberry  centers  of  New  Berne,  North  Carolina,  and  of 
Bridgeville  and  Georgetown,  Delaware,  from  each  of  which 
whole  trainloads  of  strawberries  go  to  market  in  a  single  day 
in  the  height  of  the  season;  the  total  crop  amounts  to  millions 
of  boxes  a  year.  Near  Hammonton,  New  Jersey,  is  a  similar 
centralization  of  blackberries  'and  raspberries. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
THE  APPLE 

FRUIT  growing  is  one  of  the  most  scientific  of  industries,  and 
it  is  becoming  more  so  for  two  reasons:  (1)  the  necessity  of 
combating  the  enemies  of  the  tree,  (2)  the  problems  of  market- 
ing. The  enemies  seem  to  be  steadily  increasing  in  number 
because  of  importations  of  new  pests  from  new  parts  of  the 
world,  along  with  new  plants  from  those  regions.  An  example 
is  the  San  Jose  scale,  so  named  because  of  its  first  appearance  in 
America  in  certain  nurseries  in  San  Jose,  California.  It  came 
on  trees  from  China,  was  introduced  over  all  the  Eastern  States 
before  its  activities  were  discovered,  and  for  years  killed  fruit 
trees  by  the  tens  of  thousands.  This  insect  helped  greatty  to 
advancelfcientific  fruit  growing  because  it  brought  the  necessity 
of  victory  or  complete  failure.  This  particular  little  insect 
crawls  about  for  a  few  days  in  infancy,  then,  like  the  oyster, 
it  settles  down,  attaching  itself  to  the  branches  or  fruit,  and 
spins  over  itself  a  silken  shell  or  scale  which  protects  it  against 
weather  and  many  enemies.  Under  this  tent  it  proceeds  to  suck 
the  life  juices  out  of  the  tree.  How  to  combat  it  was  a  sore 
problem  in  the  last  decade  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Horti- 
culturists had  just  learned  how  to  spray  their  trees  with  poi- 
sonous compounds,  chiefly  arsenic,  so  that  the  ordinary  surface- 
eating  insect  would  be  killed.  But  here  was  the  San  Jose  scale 
under  his  tent  eating  in  safety.  He  could  not  be  poisoned,  but 
by  a  thin  coating  of  oil  he  could  be  smothered,  and  a  combination 
of  lime  and  sulphur  would  eat  him  up  in  the  winter  when  leaves 
were  off  the  tree,  leaving  the  bark  of  the  tree  uninjured.  • 

After  working  great  havoc  for  decades,  this  insect  is  now 
safely  under  control  by  all  commercial  orchardists,  and  is  be- 
ginning to  disappear  in  response  to  a  common  law  of  pests: 
when  an  insect  is  introduced  into  a  new  region  it  often  finds  its 
old  enemies  absent,  and  so  by  the  almost  appalling  rates  of 

377 


378 


THE  APPLE 


increase  common  to  insects,  it  breeds  without  limit  for  a  time 
until  other  insects,  finding  unwonted  food  supplies,  also  increase 
and  restore  the  balance  of  nature.  Entomologists  were  sent  to 
China  and  Japan  to  find  the  enemies  of  the  scale.  They  did  so. 


FIG.  113. — Spraying  an  apple   orchard  in   Virginia   with   poisonous   mist 
to  kill  insects  and  fungi.     (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

introduced  them  into  this  country,  and  helped  to  reduce  the 
scale  to  relative  harmlessness. 

The  problems  of  marketing  fruit  in  distant  places  also  need 
much  scientific  study,  especially  as  it  requires  co-operative  action, 
a  thing  especially  difficult  to  Americans. 

Fruit  growing  is  a  capitalistic  as  well  as  a  scientific  business 


THE  APPLE  GROWER  879 

because  the  trees  must  be  planted  and  cared  for  for  a  number 
of  years  before  they  yield.  This  period,  by  the  way,  is  much 
longer  than  advertisements  indicate.  The  United  States  has  at 
times  been  deluged  with  booklets  telling  how  one  could  make  a 
living  from  a  few  acres  of  apple  trees  at  the  end  of  five  years. 
It  should  be  known  that,  on  the  average,  only  prospectus  trees 
make  profit  in  five  years.  Orchard  trees  more  usually  make 
profit  in  ten,  and  many  of  them  never  make  profit  at  all,  because 
of  the  mishaps  of  location,  discouragement,  and  the  ravages  of 
rabbits,  bugs,  cows,  borers,  fire,  root  rot,  blight,  and  many  other 
troubles.  Hence  only  a  small  proportion  of  the  people  have  the 
necessary  qualifications  for  apple  growing,  including  the  capi- 
talistic mind,  which  is  willing  to  wait  a  long  time  for  returns 
on  labor  or  money.  For  these  reasons  fruit  growing  particularly 
appeals  to  educated  people,  especially  city  people  and  profes- 
sional people  who  retire  to  the  farm.  The  orchard  has  a  charm 
for  all  those  who  love  trees.  At  blooming  time  a  sloping  expanse 
of  the  blossoms  of  peach,  apple,  cherry,  or  pear,  particularly 
apple,  is  a  thing  of  beauty  never  to  be  forgotten.  At  ripening 
time  the  increasing  burden  of  many-colored  fruits  brings  again 
a  different  and  more  substantial  beauty,  with  the  flavor  of  bank 
balances  in  it. 

The  apple  is  the  most  important  fruit  of  the  cool  temperate 
zone.  A  native  of  southwestern  Asia  and  adjacent  Europe,  it 
has  been  cultivated  from  time  immemorial.  Charred  remains  of 
the  fruit  are  found  in  the  prehistoric  lake  dwellings  of  Switzer- 
land. Now  widely  cultivated  and  almost  infinitely  variable,  it 
is  grown  in  every  temperate  climate. 

The  varieties  of  apple  trees  actually  on  sale  in  North  America 
in  any  year  are  not  far  from  one  thousand.  Each  great  geo- 
graphical area  has  varieties  which  are  particularly  adapted  to 
it;  in  the  northern  Mississippi  Valley,  for  example,  few  of  the 
Eastern  apples  thrive. 

DISTRIBUTION   OF  THE  APPLE  TREE  IN  AMERICA 

The  apple  tree  is  the  longest  lived  and,  excepting  the  cherry, 
the  largest  of  all  our  fruit  trees.  Its  trunk  frequently  attains  a 
diameter  of  two  feet  (a  girth  of  over  twelve  feet  is  known  in 


380  THE  APPLE 

Pennsylvania).  A  large  tree  will  often  produce  ten  to  twenty 
barrels  of  fruit  and  records  of  more  than  thirty  barrels  have  been 
well  established.  From  New  England  to  North  Carolina  it  is 
not  uncommon  to  find  trees  healthy  and  bearing  at  the  age  of 
one  hundred  years.  The  tree  is  hardy  and  adapted  to  a  wider 
range  of  soil  and  climatic  conditions  than  any  other  important 
fruit.  It  grows  wild  along  the  fence  rows  and  in  fields  from 
Nova  Scotia  to  North  Carolina  and  throughout  most  of  the  Ohio 
Valley  and  much-  of  the  Mississippi  Valley.  In  the  long  and 
humid  summer  of  the  cotton-belt  it  is  not  at  its  best,  and  is 
grown  only  to  a  limited  extent  for  local  use.  It  does  well  (when 
the  buds  are  not  destroyed  by  frost)  on  the  plains  and  prairies 
of  the  torn-belt,  reaches  a  high  degree  of  perfection  in  the  Ozark 
Plateau,  while  the  handsomest  and  highest-priced  apples  in 
America  are  produced  in  the  Rocky  Mountains,  in  the  Pacific 
Coast  States,  and  in  British  Columbia. 

In  the  northern  part  of  the  North  Central  States  the  combina- 
tion of  severe  dry  cold  waves  in  winter  and  hot  waves  in  summer 
has  somehow  served  to  make  the  trees  short-lived ;  there  are  few 
varieties  that  can  survive  even  for  short  periods  the  rigor  of  that 
climate.  During  the  early  settlement  of  Dakota  one  man  planted 
some  thousands  of  apple  trees  and  seeds  each  year,  getting  varie- 
ties from  all  parts  of  the  world ;  as  a  result  of  many  years  of 
experience  he  found  just  one  apple  tree  that  could  resist  the 
winter  climate.  That  survivor  has  become,  through  deliberate 
plant  breeding,  the  parent  of  most  of  the  apple  trees  in  that  part 
of  the  country. 

A  new  variety  of  apple  is  formed  by  a  chance  seedling  that, 
after  the  manner  of  seedlings,  happens  to  differ  from  the  rest  of 
its  kind, — for  plants  differ  from  each  other  as  people  do,  and  have 
about  as  many  individual  characteristics  as  people  have,  so  that 
each  natural  tree  is  a  law  unto  itself.  When  a  fine  tree  has  been 
found,  however,  the  process  of  making  an  orchard  like  it  is 
simple.  In  three  minutes'  time  an  uneducated  worker  can,  by 
grafting  or  budding,  put  a  living  piece  of  the  desired  tree  into 
a  wild  tree,  so  that  it  will  grow,  feed  on  the  vulgar  sap  from 
the  sour  crab,  and  produce  the  most  luscious  yellow  Bellflower, 
Bed  Winesap,  or  spicy  Greening. 

There  are  over  fourteen  hundred  varieties  of  apples  in  the 


DO  YOU  KNOW  APPLES?  381 

United  States,  most  of  them  of  local  value  only.  Unfortunately 
the  complete  list  of  qualifications  for  a  commercial  apple: 
namely,  vigor  of  tree,  ease  of  transplanting,  rapidity  of  growth, 
resistance  to  disease,  earliness,  regularity,  and  evenness  of  bear- 
ing, beauty  of  fruit,  firmness  and  good  shipping  qualities  of 
fruit,  are  difficult  to  combine  with  the  other  and  greatest  of  all 
objects,  namely,  flavor.  As  a  result,  many  varieties  of  delicious 
quality  produce  such  small  quantity  that  they  would  have  to  sell 
for  $20  a  barrel  to  make  profit  for  the  grower.  Others  are  almost 
impossible  to  ship  or  keep  any  great  length  of  time.  Conse- 
quently, some  of  the  varieties  grown  for  market  are  of  very  poor 
quality.  Any  person  who  desires  good  apples  must  become  ac- 
quainted with  several  good  varieties  so  that  he  can  recognize 
them,  for  the  retailer,  particularly  the  retailer  who  sells  bad 
apples,  is  strangely  ignorant  of  their  names,  his  mistakes  tending 
somehow  to  run  toward  good  names  for  bad  apples.  Some 
growers  manage  to  have  fresh  fruit  on  hand  from  their  own 
cellars  throughout  the  entire  year,  and,  while  this  is  uncommon, 
it  is  easy  with  the  aid  of  cold  storage.  Apples  are  now  in  the 
market  of  most  cities  every  day  in  the  whole  twelve  months. 

THE  APPLE  AS  A  SUPPLY   CROP  AND  AS   A    MONEY   CROP 

In  regions  where  the  tree  will  thrive,  a  few  apple  trees  for  the 
family  supply  were,  until  the  recent  arrival  of  new  pests,  a  part 
of  the  equipment  of  almost  every  American  farm,  just  as  a 
garden  is  also  a  part  of  the  family  equipment,  but  not  one  of  the 
real  farm  operations  for  a  source  of  cash  income.  The  growth  of 
perfect  apples  and  the  packing  and  transportation  to  market 
without  bruising  is  difficult ;  the  packages  are  expensive  and  the 
fruit  has  large  bulk  in  proportion  to  its  value ;  hence  the  develop- 
ment of  apple  growing  as  an  industry  to  supply  distant  markets 
is  comparatively  new  and  tends  to  be  concentrated  in  a  number 
of  special  districts.  Since  we  have  such  a  wide  territory  suitable 
for  apple  culture,  the  development  of  apple-shipping  districts  has 
depended  on  some  minor  advantage  of  location  or  on  the  enter- 
prise of  some  pioneer  grower  who  showed  the  people  of  his 
locality  that  this  crop  could  be  profitably  marketed.  After 
the  specialty  of  a  given  locality  has  become  well  established, 


382  THE  APPLE 

the  inhabitants  will  usually  assure  you  gravely  and  in  the  best 
of  faith  that  there  is  some  unusual  advantage  of  soil  or  climate 
that  makes  this  place  unique  not  only  in  the  whole  United  States 
and  Canada,  but  in  the  entire  world.  Such  a  statement  is  almost 
invariably  a  gross  inaccuracy.  The  industry  was  started  and  has 
succeeded.  That  is  all.  Other  places  with  equally  good  climatic 
and  soil  conditions  can  usually  be  found  nearby  and  far  away. 
Commercial  apple  growing  is  an  important  industry  in  locali- 
ties as  widely  separated  as  Nova  Scotia,  Ontario,  Delaware,  Vir- 
ginia, northern  Georgia,  Missouri,  Michigan,  New  Mexico, 
Arkansas,  California  (Watsonville,  near  San  Francisco),  Wash- 
ington State,  British  Columbia,  France,  Austria,  Chile,  New 
Zealand,  and  South  Africa. 

APPLE  GROWING  IN  NEW  YORK  AND   MICHIGAN 

New  York  is  the  leading  American  state  in  commercial  apple 
growing;  four  counties  on  the  shore  of  Lake  Ontario  in  the 
western  part  of  the  state  have  for  a  number  of  years  been  the 
most  important  shipping  districts  in  the  United  States.  The 
Erie  Canal  and  the  railroads  that  followed  it  gave  this  region 
an  early  advantage  of  transportation  to  New  York  and  other 
Eastern  markets,  and  also  resulted  in  low  prices  for  the  grain 
and  animal  products  that  had  been  staples  there.  In  addition 
to  this  disadvantage  for  growing  staples,  and  the  advantage  for 
apple  transport,  there  is  also  an  advantage  in  conditions  of  pro- 
duction. The  large  bodies  of  water,  Lakes  Erie  and  Ontario, 
with  their  melting  ice  in  spring,  cool  the  air,  and  serve  to  delay 
the  blossoming  time  until  there  is  small  danger  of  injury  from 
frost.  The  advantages  for  apple  growing  were  not  fully  ap- 
preciated until  after  the  Civil  War,  when  grain  growing  had 
become  unprofitable,  on  account  of  competition  from  the  new, 
rich,  cheap  lands  of  the  West.  The  farmers  in  New  York  had 
to  find  some  other  crops  than  grain  in  order  to  realize  satisfac- 
tory profits,  and  in  this  district  of  the  Lake  Shore  Plain  the 
alternative  was  apples,  as  in  other  districts  it  became  dairy- 
ing. But  even  here,  although  apples  are  the  chief  money  crop, 
there  is  no  county  in  which  the  orchards  cover  over  a  tenth  of 
the  land  surface,  a  rather  surprising  fact,  tending  to  show  how 


THE  APPLE  REGIONS  OF  UNITED  STATES       383 

rarely  any  locality  is  entirely  dependent  on  only  one  crop.  The 
prediction  has  been  made  that  within  fifty  years  the  southern 
shore  of  Lake  Ontario  will  become  one  continuous  fruit  orchard. 
The  present  profits  of  the  business  there,  the  rapidity  of  planting, 
and  the  rising  price  (now  several  hundred  dollars  an  acre)  of 
land  suitable  for  orchards  make  this  prophecy  appear  reasonable. 
The  western  side  of  the  lower  peninsula  of  Michigan,  facing 


FIG.  114. — All  important  commercial  apple  growing  in  the  United  States 
is  within  the  shaded  areas.     (Courtesy  Country  Gentleman.) 

Lake  Michigan,  is  important  in  the  production  of  apples  for 
reasons  very  similar  to  those  prevailing  in  western  New  York. 
This  region  produces  about  one-fourth  as  many  apples  as  New 
York,  but,  having  similar  climate,  it  grows  the  same  great  North- 
ern staple  apples,  Baldwin  and  Rhode  Island  Greening. 


OHIO,    PENNSYLVANIA,    AND   VIRGINIA 

A  small  field  in  apples  is  a  not  uncommon  feature  of  farms  in 
both  Ohio  and  Pennsylvania,  which  rank  high  as  apple  pro- 
ducers. In  the  hill  country  along  the  Ohio  River  in  southern 
Ohio,  where  the  orchards  are  kept  in  grass,  there  is  a  locality 
which  makes  a  specialty  of  shipping  the  Rome  Beauty — an  ex- 


384  THE  APPLE 

cellent  baking  apple.  The  chief  commercial  apple-growing  dis- 
trict of  Pennsylvania  is  in  the  southeast  in  a  part  of  a  region 
called  the  Shenandoah-Cumberland.  Most  of  the  apples  are 
grown  in  the  great  Appalachian  Valley,  in  sections  drained  by 
the  Shenandoah  River  of  Virginia  and  West  Virginia — a  region 
comprising  Frederick  County,  Virginia,  Berkeley  County,  West 
Virginia,  Washington  County,  Maryland,  Franklin  County, 
Pennsylvania,  and  Adams  County  in  the  same  state,  just  east 
of  the  Blue  Ridge.  In  the  immediate  vicinity  of  the  Potomac 
this  district  also  extends  westward  into  the  many  ridges  that 
lie  between  the  Cumberland  Valley  and  the  front  of  the  Alle- 
gheny Plateau  at  the  city  of  Cumberland,  Maryland.  P'arts  of 
this  district  rival  the  shores  of  Ontario  or  the  valleys  of  Nova 
Scotia  or  Washington  State  in  their  complete  dependence  on 
this  crop.  Along  the  south  slope  of  the  Tonoloway  Ridge,  a 
short  distance  west  of  Hancock,  Maryland,  seven  apple  orchards 
in  a  continuous  block  save  for  one  pasture  field  have  the  follow- 
ing acreage: 

Barrels 

Acres  Trees  1918  Crop 

20  500                                   200 

70  2,000                                   600 

700  53,000  31,000 

100  5,500                                4,500 

350  20,000  10,000 

80  5,500                                4,500 

100  3,000                                2,000 


1,400  89,500  62,800 

The  origin  of  apple  growing  in  this  region  is  typical  of  the 
beginning  of  most  fruit  districts.  Just  west  of  the  cities  of  Win- 
chester, Virginia,  and  Martinsburg,  West  Virginia,  is  a  low  ridge 
called  Apple-pie  Ridge.  This  suggestive  name  is  one  hundred 
and  fifty  years  old.  On  the  slope  of  this  ridge  some  fifty  years 
ago  an  enthusiast  planted  a  large  field  of  apples  which  first 
brought  him  much  ridicule  and  eventually  brought  him  many 
thousands  of  dollars.  His  example  impelled  his  neighbors  to 
plant  apple  trees,  until  now  the  ridge  for  twenty-five  miles  is  an 
almost  unbroken  succession  of  apple  orchards;  they  are  also 
being  extensively  planted  on  the  ridges  to  the  west  of  the  Great 


EASTERN  APPLES  385 

Valley.  The  chief  apple  of  this  district  is  the  York  Imperial, 
aii  excellent  cooking  apple,  and  the  Grimes  Golden,  a  yellow  fall 
dessert  apple  of  unrivaled  quality.  Along  the  eastern  slope  of 
the  Blue  Ridge  Mountains  in  central  Virginia,  with  Crozet  near 
Charlottesville  as  center  in  the  region  called  the  Piedmont,  is 
another  apple  district  from  which  large  quantities  of  fine- 
flavored  varieties  are  annually  exported  to  England.  The 
chief  apples  of  this  region  are  two  dessert  apples,  Winesap 
and  Albemarle  Pippin,  called  after  Albemarle  County,  Vir- 
ginia, but  grown  in  the  West  under  the  name  of  Newtown 
Pippin.  Thomas  Jefferson  grew  this  variety  near  Charlottes- 
ville, in  Albemarle  County,  before  the  Revolutionary  War,  and 
the  American  minister  to  England  in  the  first  year  of  Queen 
Victoria's  reign,  coming  from  that  county,  presented  her  royal 
highness  with  several  barrels  of  Albemarle  Pippins,  which 
pleased  her  so  much  that  she  had  the  duty  on  apples  removed; 
from  that  time  to  this  the  Albemarle  Pippin  has  gone  to  England 
in  steadily  increasing  quantities.  It  is  said  that  where  the 
Chesapeake  and  Ohio  Railroad  crosses  the  Blue  Ridge  Mountains 
west  of  Charlottesville,  one  can  walk  along  the  slope  of  the  moun- 
tain for  seven  miles  and  pass  continuously  from  one  apple 
orchard  into  the  next.  In  the  Blue  Ridge  country  of  western 
North  Carolina  is  an  interesting  district  of  mountainside 
orchards  where  many  of  the  orchards  were  planted  to  produce 
fruit  to  be  distilled  into  a  kind  of  brandy  called  apple-jack. 
Since  this  beverage  has  gone  out  of  style,  the  apples  are  some- 
times hauled  twenty  or  thirty  miles  over  the  mountains  to  the 
railroad  stations.  Despite  much  local  faith  to  the  contrary,  none 
of  these  Eastern  apple  districts  has  any  known  advantage  either 
of  production  or  transportation  over  other  territory  in  the 
United  States  where  the  business  has  not  happened  to  be  tried. 
The  same  may  be  said  of  nearly  all  American  fruit  localities. 

THE   OPEN    MISSISSIPPI   VALLEY   AND   THE   OZARK   PLATEAU 

On  the  southern  edge  of  the  corn-belt  in  Illinois,  northern 
Missouri,  Iowa,  and  Kansas  some  very  extensive  apple  orchards 
have  been  planted,  some  of  them  covering  more  than  a  square 
mile;  but  the  cold  waves  that  sweep  unimpeded  down  the  open 


386  THE  APPLE 

Mississippi  Valley  have  frequently  frozen  the  fruit  buds  in  April 
and  May,  so  that  some  of  these  apple  districts  are  not  prospering. 
In  the  winter  of  1910-11  one  corn-belt  orchard  of  64,000  apple 
trees  (1,600  acres)  was  pulled  up  because  a  total  of  two  crops 
in  ten  years  showed  it  to  be  less  profitable  than  corn.  In  the 
Ozark  Mountain  region  of  Missouri  and  Arkansas,  however,  an 
extensive  apple  culture  has  developed.  About  1880  a  pioneer  in 
commercial  apple  growing  planted  an  apple  orchard  of  1,400 
acres.  He  took  magnificent  specimens  of  the  fruit  to  the  World's 
Exposition  at  Chicago  in  1893  and  advertised  to  the  world  the 
virtues  of  the  Ozark  Mountains  as  a  place  for  apple  growing. 
This  country  appeared  especially  attractive,  because  land  was 
cheap  and  the  coddling  moth  was  not  there.  The  coddling  moth 
is  the  mother  of  the  apple  worm,  which  hatches  from  the  eggs 
she  lays  on  the  skin  of  the  apple.  Upon  hatching,  the  grub  bores 
into  the  core  and  when  full  grown  bores  its  way  out,  preparatory 
to  sleeping  through  the  cocoon  stage  before  emerging  as  a  flying 
moth  ready  to  lay  four  hundred  eggs.*  The  census  of  1900 
showed  that  Missouri  led  all  the  states  in  the  Union  in  the 
number  of  apple  trees.  Orchards  of  from  one  hundred  to  one 
thousand  acres  in  size  are  common.  The  rapid  extension  of  the 
industry  was  made  possible  by  the  very  low  price  of  the  land 
in  the  Ozark  plateau  and  ridges,  an  old,  worn-down  mountain 
system  ill  suited  to  grain  farming,  but  very  well  suited  to  the 
production  of  fruit.  The  elevation  and  the  protection  of  the 
mountain  location  causes  it  to  escape  many  of  the  frosts  that 
are  destructive  on  the  open  plains  to  the  north  and  east.  The 
crop  of  the  year  1907  was  almost  obliterated  in  the  open  valley 
from  the  Appalachians  to  the  Great  Plains  and  from  the  Ozarks 
to  Canada ;  but  a  single  Arkansas  county  in  the  southern  Ozarks, 
immune  from  this  particular  May  cold  wave,  produced  over 
$2,000,000  worth  of  apples.  Describing  the  results  of  this  par- 
ticular frost,  a  citizen  of  a  rich  county  in  Iowa  (Muscatine)  de- 
clared, with  accuracy:  "There  were  not  enough  apples  on  the 
many  thousand  trees  in  this  county  to  give  a  little  boy  a 
stomachache."  There  is  also  a  large  orchard  district  north  of 

*  Unfortunately  the  moth  can  travel,  and  in  a  few  years  she  reached 
Missouri  and  settled  with  all  her  generations.  But  this  discovery  was 
made  after  enormous  apple  plantings  on  the  Ozark  hills. 


WESTERN  APPLES  387 

the  Ozarks  along  the  Missouri  River  in  Missouri,  Kansas,  Ne- 
braska, and  southeastern  Iowa.  Together  with  the  Ozarks  it 
produces  about  one-third  as  large  a  crop  as  New  York  State ;  the 
variety  grown  is  chiefly  Ben  Davis,  an  apple  which  no  one  should 
eat  without  knowing  its  name. 

THE  ROCKY   MOUNTAINS  AND   THE  NORTHWEST 

In  the  newly  settled  states  of  the  Rocky  Mountains  and  the 
northern  Pacific  coast  are  many  irrigated  districts  that  produce 
beautiful  apples,  commonly  sold  in  boxes.  Some  of  these  regions, 
for  example,  the  Hood  River  Valley  in  Oregon,  the  Yakima 
and  Wenatchee  valleys  in  Washington,  and  Bitter  Root  Valley 
in  Montana,  have  already  become  well  known  in  the  eastern  part 
of  the  United  States  on  account  of  the  beautiful  fruit  they  send 
out.  Parts  of  Idaho,  Utah,  Colorado,  and  a  few  sections  of 
northern  California  are  equally  well  fitted  for  growing  this  fruit. 
California  production  is  centered  chiefly  in  the  Watsonville  dis- 
trict of  the  Pajaro  Valley,  close  to  the  Pacific  Ocean  near  San 
Francisco.  This  Western  region  is  now  capable  of  producing 
nearly  one-third  of  the  crop  of  the  United  States.  Because  of 
the  bright  sunshine  of  the  serai-arid  district,  the  apples  grown 
here  are  the  most  beautiful  produced  in  America.  The  large 
profits  yielded  by  these  orchards  when  they  first  began  to  bear 
caused  some  of  them  to  sell  at  remarkably  high  prices.  This 
fact  has  been  utilized  by  land  speculators,  who  took  possession 
of  large  tracts  of  cheap  land,  advertised  it  prodigiously  through 
the  eastern  parts  of  the  United  States  and  even  in  Europe,  and 
sold  five-  and  ten-acre  plots  of  orchard  to  be  turned  over  at  the 
end  of  five  years  to  absentee  owners  who  had  no  means  of  taking 
care  of  it,  and  who  for  a  number  of  good  reasons  have  usually 
lost  their  money.  Increased  production  has  reduced  prices  below 
those  quoted  in  the  prospectuses,  and  has  put  the  business  on  a 
really  competitive  basis.  Many  orchards  on  this  account  have 
been  pulled  up  and  the  land  put  into  alfalfa — a  crop  for  which 
all  conditions  are  admirable.  These  Western  fruit  districts,  un- 
like those  of  the  Central  and  Eastern  States,  are  of  restricted 
area,  as  they  are  limited  to  the  valleys  where  they  can  have 
proper  soil  requirements,  irrigation,  water  drainage,  air  drain- 
age, and  protection  from  strong  winds. 


388 


THE  APPLE 


Owing  to  the  small  population  of  the  Rocky  Mountain  and 
Pacific  region,  the  extensive  plantings  in  the  irrigated  valleys  of 
the  Northwest  depend  for  their  market  very  largely  on  the 
Eastern  States  and  Europe;  they  are  therefore  subjected  to  a 
much  heavier  transportation  cost  than  must  be  borne  by  their 
competitors  in  the  East.  This  is  a  permanent  disadvantage. 


FIG.  115. — Furrow  irrigation  of  four-year-old  apple  trees  at 
Wenatchee,  Washington.      (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

Of  late  years  much  attention  has  been  given  to  the  prevention 
of  frost  in  orchards,  particularly  apple  orchards,  by  building 
fires  on  frosty  nights.  This  method  requires  a  great  number  of 
little  fire-pots  per  acre,  each  of  which  is  charged  with  crude 
petroleum  ready  for  the  match  at  2  or  3  A.M.  as  the  temperature 
approaches  the  danger  point.  Unfortunately  this  is  an  expen- 
sive and  perhaps  a  temporary  device.  It  takes  great  moral 
courage  to  burn  up  two  or  three  hundred  dollars'  worth  of  oil 
in  a  night,  when  perhaps,  after  all,  it  might  not  be  cold  enough 
to  freeze.  It  takes  more  courage  to  repeat  the  process  on  the 


THE  SPECIALIZED  ORCHARD  389 

next  night  and  again  the  next  week.  Moreover,  the  prospective 
scarcity  of  oil  because  of  the  enormous  demands  for  automobiles 
and  other  uses  may  easily  make  the  fires  so  costly  that  the 
orchard  in  the  frosty  location  cannot  compete  with  the  more 
naturally  protected  locations  on  lake  shores,  warm  peninsulas, 
and  thermal  belts  on  mountain  sides. 


THE   EXTENT   OF   THE   AMERICAN   APPLE   INDUSTRY 

Ordinarily,  one  or  two  bushels  of  apples  per  capita  are  grown 
each  year  in  the  United  States.  The  crop  of  the  year  1900  was 
one  hundred  and  seventy-five  million  bushels,  of  which  thirty- 
nine  per  cent,  were  grown  in  the  three  states  of  New  York,  Penn- 
sylvania, and  Ohio.  These  figures  prove  little,  because  the  apple 
crop  of  any  locality  normally  fluctuates  from  twenty  to  one 
hundred  per  cent,  of  a  full  crop.  An  apple  tree  will  rarely  bear 
two  heavy  crops  in  succession ;  this  fact,  in  addition  to  occasional 
injuries  by  frosts,  makes  it  exceedingly  rare  for  all  the  different 
apple  districts  to  have  a  full  crop  at  the  same  time.  When  they 
do,  as  in  the  year  1896,  the  crop  exceeds  the  demand,,  and  the 
apples  have  almost  no  value  (seventy-five  cents  per  barrel  in 
March,  1897). 

The  difficulty  of  growing,  packing,  and  shipping  apples  is 
transferring  the  business  from  the  small  orchard  of  the  general 
farmer  to  the  large  orchard  of  the  specialist  in  the  better  located 
fruit  districts.  There  has  resulted  a  rapid  increase  in  the  com- 
merce in  the  apple,  which  is  more  generally  used  by  all  classes 
in  the  United  States  than  in  any  other  country.  In  the  last  two 
decades  the  sale  of  apples  in  country  stores  in  the  farming  dis- 
tricts has  become  quite  common. 

THE   EFFECT   OF   REFRIGERATION 

Each  year  in  the  United  States  millions  of  barrels  of  apples 
are  placed  in  cold-storage  plants  at  a  temperature  of  33°,  which 
greatly  prolongs  their  keeping  qualities.  Under  good  storage 
conditions  some  varieties  of  apples  will  keep  well  for  a  full  year, 
so  that  cold-storage  warehouses,  refrigerator  cars,  and  refriger- 
ator ships  have  made  possible  the  easy  distribution  of  American 


390  THE  APPLE 

apples  all  over  the  United  States  and  western  Europe,  and  have 
also  made  possible  their  sale  and  use  every  day  in  the  year.  The 
United  States  normally  exports  one  or  two  millions  of  barrels 
each  year,  chiefly  to  the  United  Kingdom  and  Germany,  and  a 
few  thousand  barrels  each  year  to  Cuba,  Brazil,  Mexico,  and 
other  tropical  American  countries,  where  the  apple  cannot  be 
grown. 

The  greater  distribution  of  fresh  apples  has  caused  a  marked 
falling  off  in  the  use  of  dried  apples. 


Nearly  as  many  apples  are  exported  from  Canada  as  from  the 
United  States.  The  fruit  thrives  from  Lake  Huron  to  the  mouth 
of  the  St.  Lawrence ;  and  two  localities  have  utilized  their  special 
advantages  to  develop  the  apple  as  a  money  crop  for  the  foreign 
trade.  The  most  famous  of  these  is  the  Annapolis  Valley  in 
Nova  Scotia,  with  a  capacity  of  from  one  to  two  million  barrels. 
This  narrow  valley  in  the  western  part  of  the  peninsula  is  pro- 
tected from  north  and  northwest  winds  by  the  Bay  of  Fundy 
and  a  sheltering  mountain -range.  These  advantages,  together 
with  an  early  start,  convenient  access  to  the  seacoast,  and  rela- 
tive unfitness  for  other  forms  of  agriculture,  have  resulted  in  a 
development  of  apple  growing  that  has  made  its  product  famous 
in  Britain.  The  apple  is  the  chief  money  crop  and  financial 
dependence  of  its  people.  The  second  Canadian  apple  district 
is  near  Niagara  Falls  on  the  peninsula  between  Lakes  Erie  and 
Ontario,  where  it  has  the  protecting  influence  of  the  water 
similar  to  that  which  benefits  the  New  York  lake  shore  apple 
belt,  of  which  it  is  really  an  extension  separated  only  by  the 
Niagara  River.  In  British  Columbia  there  is  to  some  extent  a 
duplication  of  the  apple  growing  in  the  valleys  of  Washington 
State.  The  industry  was  largely  carried  on  by  English  younger 
sons,  mostly  bachelors,  many  of  them  sorely  disappointed  in 
their  orchards;  when  the  war  broke  out  they  enlisted  in  such 
numbers  that  in  some  places  the  population  was  reduced  one- 
half. 


APPLES  AT  A  DOLLAR  A  POUND  391 

EUROPEAN  AND  ASIATIC   APPLE  GROWING 

Apples  are  at  home  in  Europe  and  Asia  from  Edinburgh  to 
the  Mediterranean,  from  the  Bay  of  Biscay  to  Tokio.  They  are 
quite  commonly  grown  throughout  western  Europe,  being  the 
chief  fruit  crop  of  the  two  hundred  thousand  acres  of  British 
orchards.  But  western  Europe  does  not  supply  enough  apples 
for  its  own  use.  The  regions  of  greatest  production  on  the  con- 
tinent are  the  mountain  valleys  in  the  highlands  of  southern 
Germany,  of  Switzerland,  and  of  the  eastern  Alpine  regions  in 
Austria.  The  individual  orchards  of  Europe  are  much  smaller 
than  those  of  the  United  States  because  of  the  small  size  of  the 
farms  in  all  these  apple  regions.  But  the  total  European  pro- 
duction is  large  and  there  is  a  heavy  traffic  to  the  cities  of 
Berlin,  Paris,  and  London,  and  to  the  numerous  small  towns  of 
the  manufacturing  districts  of  the  Rhine  Valley  and  the  adjacent 
territories  of  France,  Germany,  Holland,  Belgium,  Switzerland, 
and  Austria.  In  some  cases  canal  boats  are  loaded  with  apples 
in  bulk,  taken  to  the  city,  and  tied  up  to  the  bank  until  the  load 
is  sold  to  consumers,  who  carry  the  apples  home  in  their  market 
baskets.  This  lesson  in  economy  demonstrates  the  foolishness  of 
the  American  practice  of  making  expensive  packages  to  be  used 
once  and  then  broken  up,  and  of  paying  costly  railroad  trans- 
portation and  local  delivery  costs. 

In  some  parts  of  Germany  and  near  Paris,  apples  of  excep- 
tional quality  and  local  repute  have  been  grown  under  conditions 
which  typify  the  painstaking  methods  of  the  European  gardener, 
fruit  grower,  and  small  farmer.  When  of  the  finest  quality  and 
size,  these  apples  used  to  bring  the  fabulous  price  of  a  dollar  a 
pound  in  the  markets  of  London  and  Paris.  Only  a  few  such 
apples  can  be  grown  on  each  tree,  which  by  careful  pruning  is 
sometimes  made  to  resemble  the  grape  vine  in  form. 

In  a  recent  year  frost  destroyed  all  the  buds  on  the  trees  in 
one  district  in  the  Rhine  Valley;  but  the  growers  avoided  the 
apparently  inevitable  loss  of  the  crop  by  methods  which  could 
have  been  practised  only  by  the  painstaking  gardeners  of  Europe 
or  the  Orient.  From  another  part  of  Germany  where  the  buds 
of  this  variety  had  not  been  destroyed  were  secured  twigs  bear- 
ing good  buds.  These  twigs  were  grafted  into  branches  of  the 


392 


THE  APPLE 


frosted  trees  so  that  they  lived  and  bloomed.  A  second  branch 
of  the  tree  was  side-grafted  into  the  bud-bearing  graft  to  nourish 
it.  By  this  method  each  double  graft  was  made  to  produce  one 
of  the  precious  apples.  Such  costly  production  makes  it  clear 
why  Europe  can  be  supplied  with  apples  produced  by  American 
wholesale  methods  of  agriculture,  whereby  the  orchards  are 


Fro.  116  and  117. — These  two  trees  were  planted  the  same  day,  side 
by  side.  They  are  of  the  same  variety,  had  the  same  treatment,  except 
that  one  had  about  2y2  pounds  of  sulphate  of  ammonia  per  year  for  five 
years.  Photographing  and  measuring  of  the  crop  were  fairly  done. 
(Courtesy  The  Barrett  Manufacturing  Company.) 

cultivated  with  tractor-drawn  plows,  poisonous  sprays  are  put  on 
the  trees  with  gasoline  engines,  the  apples  are  run  through 
engine-driven  sizing  machines  that  can  sort  from  one  hundred 
to  one  thousand  barrels  a  day,  and  are  raced  off  to  the  freight  car 
in  motor  trucks  for  full  carload  shipment  to  great  markets.  • 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  NITROGEN 


393 


From  Constantinople  eastward  throughout  the  central  regions 
of  Asia  the  apple  grows  wild  in  many  mountain  districts  and  can 
be  grown  in  almost  any  location  where  there  is  sufficient  water, 
but  in  the  lowlands  this  must  usually  be  supplied  by  irrigation. 
The  fruit  is  quite  commonly  grown  by  the  Chinese  farmers  of 
the  Upper  Yangtse  Valley  and  in  all  cooler  parts  of  China,  and 


rV- 

Afttfii 


FIG.  117. — See  opposite  page. 

to  some  extent  also  in  Manchuria,  Korea,  and  Japan.  Although 
important  to  the  local  population,  it  has  not  in  this  region  of 
undeveloped  transportation  become  an  important  article  of  com- 
merce. 

THE   APPLE   IN   THE   SOUTH   TEMPERATE   ZONE 

The  south  temperate  zone,  with  the  reverse  arrangement  of  its 
seasons,  can  send  its  fresh  autumn  fruits  to  the  North  at  the  end 
of  the  winter  when  ours  are  gone  or  have  been  long  in  storage. 


394  THE  APPLE 

The  south  temperate  zone  has  spots  with  climate  and  resources 
well  suited  to  the  apple,  particularly  in  New  Zealand  and  the 
island  of  Tasmania.  This  latter  island  is  about  as  large  as  West 
Virginia,  which  it  resembles  in  its  combination  of  mountain  and 
valley,  its  good  rainfall,  and  its  mountain  orchards.  Its  orchard 
area  is  one-tenth  that  of  Britain.  Tasmanian  apples  are  sent  to 
Australia  and  in  limited  amounts  to  England.  Southern  New 
Zealand,  with  a  similar  climate,  sends  more  to  the  British 
market.  The  total  export  from  the  Southern  Hemisphere,  how- 
ever, is  small  in  comparison  with  that  from  the  United  States 
and  Canada. 

South  Africa  also  has  an  apple  district.  The  apple  is  said 
to  grow  wild  in  parts  of  southern  Chile,  and  to  be  largely 
grown  for  local  use  on  the  fine  plains  near  Santiago.  It  is  quite 
probable  that  when  Panama  Canal  traffic  is  well  established,  this 
district,  which  will  then  lie  almost  as  near  as  Italy,  and  com- 
mercially nearer  than  Pacific  Coast  districts  to  New  York,  Phila- 
delphia, and  New  Orleans,  will  begin  to  send  us  apples  at  the 
season  when  the  trees  of  New  York,  Virginia,  and  Washington 
are  just  beginning  to  bloom.  Small  shipments  are  already  com- 
ing to  New  York  occasionally  from  Cape  Colony  and  Tasmania. 

FUTURE   SUPPLY    AND   ADAPTATION   TO   NATURAL    RESOURCES 

The  apple  and  other  fruits  are  unlike  meat  and  grain,  in  which 
we  have  nearly  or  quite  reached  a  limit  of  resource,  so  that 
greater  production  must  result  from  greater  effort.  The  yield  of 
the  apple  (one  to  five  hundred  bushels  per  acre)  is  many  times 
that  of  grain.  It  is  capable  of  being  produced  on  rough  unarable 
land,  of  which  there  is  a  large  amount,  especially  east  of  the 
Mississippi  River.  Some  of  the  finest  apples  grown  in  the  eastern 
part  of  the  United  States  are  produced  on  hillsides  which  are 
quite  steep  and  rough  and  wholly  unsuited  to  grain  growing. 
In  many  cases  they  are  rarely  plowed  and  in  some  cases  they 
have  never  been  plowed.  This  suggests  that  as  our  agriculture 
becomes  better  adjusted  to  the  geographic  conditions  of  the 
country,  the  hillsides  are  likely  to  produce  a  greater  and  greater 
proportion  of  our  fruit,  leaving  the  level  lands  for  broad  tillage 
and  grain  production.  The  large  yield  from  small  area  (with 


OVERPRODUCTION  395 

great  land  resources  unused)  suggests  that  low  prices  may  be 
expected,  and  overproduction  is  possible.  In  this  respect  the 
apple  belongs  with  the  potato,  the  truck  crops,  and  all  the  other 
fruits.  A  few  years  ago  a  fear  of  overproduction  caused  a  gen- 
eral stopping  of  planting  in  nearly  all  parts  of  the  United  States. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 
PEACHES,  APRICOTS,  PLUMS,  CHERRIES,  AND  PEARS 

THE  PERISHABLE   NATURE  OF   THE   PEACH   AND   ITS   COMMERCIAL 

EFFECT 

THE  peach  is  a  delicious  fruit  which  is  regarded  as  more  of  a 
luxury  than  the  apple,  partly  because  it  is  difficult  to  produce, 
partly  because  it  is  so  very  good,  and  partly  because  on  account 
of  its  perishable  nature  it  cannot  so  easily  become  a  staple  of 
commerce.  It  is  a  great  misfortune  to  man  that  the  peach  will 
not  keep  as  well  as  tho  apple.  While  some  apples  will  keep  for 
a  full  year,  even  for  two  years,  the  standard  market  peaches 
cannot  be  kept  in  good  condition  longer  than  ten  days  or  two 
weeks  without  excessive  cost,  while  most  of  the  best  varieties 
are  so  soft  that  they  cannot  go  to  market  at  all  except  in  the 
immediate  vicinity  of  the  place  where  they  are  grown.  But  the 
fruit  is  so  highly  esteemed  that,  though  a  few  years  ago  it 
entered  into  commerce  but  little,  since  the  coming  of  fast  trains, 
refrigerator  cars,  and  steamships,  it  is  being  marketed  over  the 
whole  United  States  and  Europe  and  even  sent  across  the  ocean. 
Because  of  the  perishable  nature  of  the  peach,  there  is  often  only 
one  day  on  which  it  can  be  picked  for  distant  market.  The  day 
before  it  is  too  green;  the  next  day  it  is  too  soft;  consequently 
peaches  sometimes  rot  by  the  thousands  of  bushels  because  they 
cannot  be  sent  to  the  markets.  A  thousand-acre  peach  orchard 
must  have  a  perfectly  planned  succession  of  varieties,  so  that 
the  labor  may  be  fully  employed  from  the  first  ripenings  in 
July  to  the  last  in  October,  when  the  little  army  of  peach  pickers 
break  camp  and  the  men  disperse  to  their  distant  homes.  Wide 
demand,  in  combination  with  difficulty  of  production,  gives  a 
high  value  to  the  peach  and  makes  it  an  excellent  money  crop  in 
the  favored  localities  that  can  successfully  produce  and  market  it. 


A  FOOTBALL  OF  CLIMATE  397 

CLIMATE   AND   THE   PEACH    CROP 

The  peach  tree  is  an  exotic,  delicate,  with  many  enemies.  The 
peach,  unlike  the  apple,  yields  well  only  in  restricted  localities 
under  special  climatic  conditions.  The  tree  is  easily  injured 
by  the  severe  cold  of  winter  and  the  crop  is  injured  by  extreme 
cold  as  well  as  the  late  frosts  of  spring.  It  is  apparently  a 
native  of  Persia,  and  grows  from  the  Atlantic  coasts  of  Portugal 
and  Africa  to  the  Pacific  coasts  of  Japan ;  but,  like  the  apple, 
the  peach  is  nowhere  throughout  this  vast  region  an  important 
article  of  commerce  except  in  small  sections  of  Europe.  Not  only 
do  spring  frosts  often  destroy  the  buds  or  young  fruit,  but  a 
warm  summer  is  required,  with  much  sunshine  for  proper  ripen- 
ing. This  condition  does  not  exist  in  'Germany,  Holland,  Bel- 
gium, the  north  of  France  or  Great  Britain,  and  the  fruit  can  be 
grown  in  these  countries  only  artificially  in  hothouses  or  on  the 
south  side  of  walls,  where  the  tree  is  trimmed  so  that  it  spreads 
out  like  a  fan  against  the  flat  surface,  being  thus  protected  from 
north  winds  and  catching  the  direct  rays  from  the  sun  as  well  as 
the  heat  reflected  from  the  wall. 

The  European  settlers  brought  to  the  United  States  varieties 
that  had  for  several  centuries  been  growing  against  the  walls 
of  northern  Europe.  A  recent  discovery  by  an  American  pro- 
fessor of  horticulture  shows  the  debt  of  industry,  particularly  of 
agriculture  and  fruit  growing,  to  science.  The  peach  tree  in 
northern  Europe  needs  heat;  by  the  strange  adaptation  to 
environment  of  which  plants  are  capable,  it  gradually  acquired 
a  reddish  bark,  which  absorbs  more  heat  from  the  rays  of  the 
sun  than  a  light-colored  bark  can  absorb,  just  as  light-colored 
clothing  reflects  heat  and  is  therefore  cooler  than  dark  clothing, 
which  absorbs  heat.  But,  in  acquiring  in  England  ability  to 
absorb  heat,  the  peach  was  fitting  itself  for  destruction  in 
America,  where,  over  the  whole  eastern  half  of  the  country  with 
its  continental  climate,  a  great  danger  to  the  peach  is  its  tend- 
ency to  bloom  in  the  first  warm  days  of  spring  and  have  the 
blossom  or  young  fruit  killed  by  a  subsequent  frost.  It  has  been 
discovered  that  the  red  twigs  of  European  varieties  get  warmer 
in  spring  sunshine,  bud  earlier,  and  are  destroyed  oftener  than 
varieties  with  a  light  green  bark.  This  has  set  the  plant  breeders 


398     PEACHES,  APRICOTS,  PLUMS,  CHERRIES,  PEARS 

to  searching  for  green-bark  varieties  of  peaches  to  replace  the 
prevalent  red-bark  ones,  so  that  the  tree  will  be  less  subject  to 
frosts.  At  best  the  peach  can  become  an  important  money  crop 
only  in  regions  somewhat  free  from  early  frost.  The  United 
States  has  at  least  eight  such  districts,  where  the  industry  is 
already  developed. 


THE    PEACH-BELTS   OF   THE   GREAT   LAKES 

Two  of  these  localities  where  peach  growing  is  specialized, 
and  has  become  an  important  monej^  crop,  are  near  the  Great 
Lakes,  whose  cold  surface  and  melting  ice  result  in  the  cool 
spring  temperature  that  delays  the  blooming  of  the  peaches  until 
after  the  frosts.  The  peach  area  is  rapidly  increasing  in  impor- 
tance in  the  part  of  western  New  York  where  apples  are  grown. 
Some  peaches  are  also  grown  along  the  shores  in  southern  On- 
tario, and  along  the  so-called  Finger  Lakes  of  central  New 
York. 

The  second  peach-belt,  determined  by  the  Great  Lakes,  is 
on  the  eastern  shore  of  Lake  Michigan,  where  the  prevalent  west 
winds,  blowing  inland  from  the  lake,  give  the  necessary  tempera- 
ture control  over  a  belt  less  than  ten  miles  in  width.  In  the 
same  latitude  on  the  opposite  shore  of  the  lake  the  peach  is  not 
grown  at  all  or  is  of  small  importance.  Both  of  these  districts 
have  the  great  disadvantage  of  an  occasional  winter  temperature 
far  enough  below  zero,  to  kill  the  buds  and  ruin  the  crop, 
for  unfortunately  the  peach  cannot  stand  temperatures  much 
under  10  °  F.  below  zero,  even  in  midwinter.  These  districts 
are,  however,  unusually  accessible  to  markets:  from  Michigan 
by  steamer  across  the  lake  to  Chicago  and  from  western  New 
York  by  the  many  railroads  to  Buffalo,  New  York  City,  and 
New  England. 

The  history  of  peach  growing  in  this  Michigan  district  fur- 
nishes another  good  example  of  the  dependence  of  industry  on 
science.  A  mysterious,  incurable,  and  fatal  disease  called  "the 
yellows"  spread  from  peach  tree  to  peach  tree.  Unchecked,  it 
worked  destruction  in  the  western  Michigan  peach-belt  and 
reduced  the  number  of  trees  in  one  county  from  600,000  in  1870 
to  30,000  in  1884.  This  reduced  to  the  value  of  $10  or  $20  per 


FIGHTING  DISEASES  399 

acre  land  which  had  been  worth  from  $50  to  $100,  and  brought 
communities  to  the  verge  of  bankruptcy  and  social  disorganiza- 
tion. Then  it  was  discovered  at  the  State  Agricultural  Experi- 
ment Station  that  if  every  tree  having  the  yellows  was  removed 
when  the  disease  was  first  discovered,  only  one  or  two  per  cent, 
of  the  trees  per  year  would  be  killed,  and  the  peach  industry 
could  thrive.  The  Michigan  peach  industry  rose  again.  The 
county  that  had  but  30,000  trees  in  1890  had  over  a  million  in 
1906,  and  throughout  the  peach-belt  prosperity  again  prevailed 
and  continues.  Nearly  every  farm  there  has  its  money  crop  of 
peaches,  which  are  sent  in  boatloads  to  Chicago,  and  in  carloads 
and  trainloads  to  New  York  and  many  other  distant  cities. 

THE   CHESAPEAKE  AND   ALLEGHENY   PEACH-BELTS 

The  third  peach-belt  is  on  the  peninsula  east  of  the  Chesa- 
peake Bay  in  the  states  of  Delaware  and  Maryland.  Here,  upon 
sandy  soil  ill  suited  to  grain,  grass,  or  livestock,  and  somewhat 
protected  from  frosts  by  the  adjacent  waters  of  the  Bay,  arose 
shortly  after  the  Civil  War  the  first  great  centralized  peach  busi- 
ness in  the  United  States.  It  has  been  discovered  within  recent 
years,  however,  that  the  cooler  climate  of  the  ridges  in  the 
Allegheny  region,  to  the  west  of  the  Great  Valley,  delays  the 
blossoming  of  the  peach  tree  more  than  the  Bay  does  and  makes 
an  orchardist  sure  of  four  crops  in  five  years,  while  the  greater 
prevalence  of  frost  on  the  low  peninsula  east  of  the  Chesapeake 
Bay  reduces  the  average  number  of  crops  there  to  about  three 
in  five  years.  The  advantage  of  the  hill  over  the  plain  is  due  to 
two  climatic  factors:  First,  the  elevation,  whose  coolness  delays 
spring  growth ;  second,  frost  drainage.  Cold  air  is  heavier  than 
warm  air;  hence,  on  still  frosty  nights,  it  settles  to  the  lowland 
where  fruit  buds  freeze,  while  the  hills  are  frost  free.  Sometimes 
the  frost  line  of  crop  failure  is  marked  through  the  orchards 
along  the  side  of  a  ridge  almost  as  sharply  as  if  it  had  been  the 
level  of  flood  waters.  On  account  of  this  advantage,  the  fourth 
peach-belt  is  developing  rapidly  on  the  mountain  slopes  of  the 
Blue  Ridge  and  the  Alleghenies  in  the  Potomac  drainage  basin 
in  southern  Pennsylvania,  western  Maryland,  and  the  eastern 
part  of  West  Virginia.  Here  are  some  of  the  moat  highly 


400     PEACHES,  APRICOTS,  PLUMS,  CHERRIES,  PEARS 

organized  of  all  agricultural  industries.  Single  peach  orchards 
comprise  from  100  to  500  acres  and  there  are  cases  of  single 
orchards  1,000  acres  in  extent. 

SOUTHERN    NEW   ENGLAND    HILL   PEACHES 

The  ability  of  the  peach  to  do  better  on  mountain  tops  than 
on  lowlands  has  led  to  the  discovery  that  it  can  be  grown  on 
many  of  the  higher  hills  of  southern  New  England.  Conse- 
quently prosperous  orchards  are  now  yielding  occasional  good 
crops  on  the  hilltops  overlooking  the  Connecticut  Valley  in  the 
state  of  Connecticut,  an  area  which  has  never  before  known  a 
commercial  peach  production.  It  has  the  great  advantage  of 
being  close  to  markets,  so  that  a  good  crop  brings  a  high  price 
with  almost  fabulous  returns. 

Some  peaches  are  also  grown  in  certain  sheltered  spots  usually 
on  high  benches  overlooking  valleys  in  the  central  Rocky  Moun- 
tain region,  especially  Colorado  and  Utah.  The  distance  of  these 
localities  from  the  centers  of  population  is  a  great  drawback. 

THE   OZARK   AND   ROCKY    MOUNTAIN   PEACH   DISTRICT 

In  the  central  part  of  the  country  the  Ozark  ridges  furnish 
some  frost  protection  to  a  vast  plain  where  cold  waves  would 
be  perilous  to  the  peach.  There  is  an  enormous  peach  production 
in  Arkansas  and  southwestern  Missouri,  but  the  crop  is  less 
certain  than  that  of  Appalachia  or  New  York. 

THE   SOUTHERN   PEACH   DISTRICTS 

In  all  these  Northern  peach-belts  the  main  crop  is  not  ready 
for  the  market  before  August.  Since  the  express  service  has 
been  perfected  by  the  railroads  it  has  been  found  possible  to 
grow  fine  crops  of  peaches  on  cotton  land  in  central  and  north- 
ern Georgia  and  market  them  in  Northern  cities  some  weeks 
before  the  crops  of  Maryland,  New  York,  or  Michigan  are  ready. 
These  Northern  and  Southern  regions  are,  therefore,  not  competi- 
tors in  the  fresh  fruit  market.  Georgia's  chief  advantage  is  the 
absence  of  rival  producers  rather  than  surety  of  production.  The 
uncertainty  of  the  peach  crop  is  shown  by  the  uprooting  of  a 


FREIGHT  AND  FROST  401 

2,100-acre  Georgia  peach  orchard  in  1911,  and  the  planting  of 
the  land  to  the  more  reliable  corn  and  cotton.  In  the  Southwest, 
in  eastern  Texas,  a  seventh  peach-belt  is  coming  into  prominence. 
This  is  a  counterpart  of  the  Georgia  belt  and  normally  supplies 
the  southwestern  and  central  part  of  the  country,  but  the  prac- 
tical certainty  that  there  will  never  be  a  full  crop  in  all  of  the 
peach  districts  at  one  time  causes  each  peach  district  to  have 
a  certain  market  for  its  product.  If  one  or  two  districts  happen 
to  have  a  monopoly  the  profits  are  very  large  and  a  light  crop 
is  often  more  profitable  than  a  heavy  one. 

CALIFORNIA   PEACH   GROWING 

California  has  the  eighth  and  last  peach-belt  in  America.  Its 
crop  is  probably  the  most  certain  of  all,  even  more  so  than  that 
of  the  Potomac  Valley.  It  has  one  clear  advantage :  the  lack  of 
the  severe  winters  which  sometimes  destroy  the  buds  with  zero 
temperatures.  Bordering  on  the  Pacific  Ocean  with  the  preva- 
lent warm  westerly  winds  from  that  great  body  of  water,  this 
state  has  a  normal  oceanic  climate  nearly  free  from  the  cold 
waves  and  strong  winds  that  spread  over  all  territory  east  of  the 
Rocky  Mountains.  Peaches  can,  therefore,  be  raised  with  fair 
assurance  of  getting  a  crop,  though  destruction  by  frost  is  known 
even  there.  By  a  peculiar  compensation  of  nature,  this  district 
suffers  by  being  far  from  market,  so  that  it  is  not  in  a  position 
to  reap  the  great  advantage  of  its  regular  crops  except  in  rare 
seasons  when  there  is  failure  in  the  East.  California  peach 
orchards  are  of  great  extent,  and,  owing  to  the  perfection  of 
the  methods  of  picking,  packing,  and  shipping,  their  product  is, 
in  seasons  of  short  crop  in  the  East,  sent  by  carloads  and  train- 
loads  to  all  the  larger  Eastern  cities  and  at  times  even  as  far  as 
London.  But  a  full  crop  in  the  Eastern  districts  makes  it  impos- 
sible for  California  growers  to  pay  the  freight;  millions  of 
pounds  of  the  fruit  are  then  dried  and  canned. 

The  force  of  this  limiting  factor  of  freight  charges  for 
Pacific  Coast  fruit  growers  is  shown  by  a  New  York  market 
report  of  August  20,  1911.  "The  losses  to  recent  shippers  of 
pears  and  plums  from  the  far  West  have  in  some  cases  been  as 
much  as  $300  per  car." 

LIBRARY 

STATC  TFAC'  ER'S  (TL'EGE 
SA..TA  EAHBAfiA.  C»LlF~RNIA 


402     PEACHES,  APRICOTS,  PLUMS,  CHERRIES,  PEARS 

The  exacting  care  required  to  market  successfully  the  peach 
crop  has  a  tendency  to  cause  the  commercial  growing  of  this  fruit 
to  be  the  chief  occupation  of  the  grower,  who  must  be  a  specialist 
and  business  organizer  of  ability.  Chiefly  because  of  the  diffi- 
culty of  marketing,  peaches  rot  in  the  United  States  by  the  hun- 
dreds of  thousands  of  bushels  each  year  of  good  production. 

On  September  19,  1914,  fifty-five  cars  of  Utah  peaches  were 
shipped  on  contracts  to  St.  Louis  commission  men  in  the  most 
approved  style  of  co-operative  associations,  but  the  peaches  were 
thrown  back  on  the  railroads  to  collect  the  $15,000  freight,  and 
brought  the  owners  twenty-five  cents  a  bushel. 

EUROPEAN   PEACH   GROWING 

In  England  the  peach  is  always  a  high-priced  luxury,  the 
small  import  into  that  country  coming  chiefly  from  the  south  of 
France,  and  from  Italy.  There  appears  to  be  no  good  reason 
why  proper  development  of  transportation  facilities  should  not 
give  western  Europe  a  cheap  and  abundant  peach  supply  from 
Spain,  Portugal,  and  North  Africa.  It  is  merely  one  of  those 
surprisingly  numerous  unused  opportunities  in  European  agri- 
culture. The  increasing  export  from  the  United  States  and 
Canada  shows  that  the  fruit  can  stand  the  transportation,  and  it 
is  a  real  puzzle  why  such  industry  has  not  been  organized  long 
ago. 

THE   PEACH   IN   THE   SOUTH   TEMPERATE   ZONE 

The  peach  does  as  well  in  the  south  temperate  as  in  the  north 
temperate  zone.  It  is  said  that  peach-tree  wood  was  for  many 
years  one  of  the  chief  sources  of  wood  supply  for  the  city  of 
Buenos  Aires,  and  peaches  of  excellent  quality  are  grown  in 
Chile,  South  Africa,  Australia,  and  New  Zealand.  Thus  far,  the 
only  country  in  the  south  temperate  zone  that  has  been  able  to 
market  its  peaches  in  Europe  or  America  is  South  Africa,  whence 
the  British  mail  steamers  in  February  and  March  bring  small 
quantities  of  excellent  fruit  to  European  markets.  They  are 
even  sent  to  the  United  States,  but  many  of  them  decay  in  the 
three  to  four  weeks  spent  in  transit,  with  the  result  that  they 
retail  at  exorbitant  prices  (often  twenty-five  cents  each)  and  the 


MORE  PEACHES  403 

market  is  naturally  very  limited.  The  improvement  in  ocean 
service  and  the  opening  of  the  Panama  Canal  may  lead  before 
many  years  to  much  quicker  and  cheaper  transportation  of  thus 
much-prized  fruit,  particularly  from  the  less  distant  peach 
region  of  Chile,  and  to  a  consequently  enlarged  importation  in 
the  spring  months  when  Northern  frosts  still  prevail  or  our  trees 
are  only  beginning  to  stir  from  their  winter  slumber. 

The  supply  of  peaches  in  the  United  States  could  easily  be 
increased  many  fold  so  far  as  land  is  concerned,  for  the  very 
same  ridges  that  make  the  excellent  Potomac  Basin  district  run 
northward  and  southward  for  scores,  sometimes  for  hundreds, 
of  miles.  These  unused  ridges  are  good  for  peaches  almost  from 
end  to  end.  The  problem  is  one  of  market  and  demand  rather 
than  of  supply. 

THE  APRICOT  is  closely  related  to  the  peach  botanically  and  as 
a  food,  but  it  has  to  a  greater  extent  the  greatest  weakness  of 
the  peach  itself;  namely,  the  tendency  to  very  early  blooming 
in  the  spring,  making  itself  thereby  a  prey  to  frost.  It  is  there- 
fore not  grown  at  all  commercially  east  of  the  Rocky  Mountains, 
but  is  limited  to  California,  whence  it  is  shipped  fresh  in  small 
quantities  to  the  East  before  Eastern  peaches  are  ripe  in  quan- 
tity. Most  of  the  crop  is  dried. 

The  plum  is  a  fruit  of  great  productivity  and  many  varieties, 
from  three  entirely  different  sources — Europe,  Japan,  and 
America.  Wild  plums,  good,  and  big  enough  to  eat,  grew  in 
dense  thickets  in  many  parts  of  the  United  States  when  the 
white  man  came.  There  is  one,  a  beach  plum,  that  grows  on 
the  dunes  of  the  north  Atlantic  coast.  Others  even  pushed 
up  the  streams  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  beyond  the  limit  of  large 
forests  and  withstood  the  ravages  of  blizzards  sufficiently  at  least 
to  reproduce  themselves,  and  occasionally  made  great  crops  which 
were  much  prized  by  the  settlers  of  1860-1900.  One  of  these 
native  varieties,  important  in  orchard  growth  for  a  time  at  least, 
was  called  the  Wild  Goose  plum,  because  the  parent  tree  grew 
from  a  seed  taken  from  the  crop  of  a  wild  goose  that  had  fed 
upon  the  fruit.  Plum  trees,  like  peach  trees,  are  subject  to  many 
enemies,  but  with  care  they  can  be  grown  in  great  quantity. 
Some  of  them  produce  so  much  fruit  that  if  the  branches  are 
allowed  to  grow  full  length,  the  burden  of  fruit  breaks  them 


down  even  if  a  prop  is  put  under  the  limb.  Throughout  much 
of  the  eastern  Appalachian  region  half-wild  damsons  are  so 
abundant  that  in  some  seasons  they  go  begging  in  the  towns  at 
$1.00  a  bushel. 

The  only  plum  of  any  great  importance  in  the  food  supply  of 
America  is  the  prune,  whose  great  surplus  crop  can  be  dried 
for  future  use.  This  species  has  long  been  grown  in  the  Medi- 
terranean region  of  Europe.  It  was  introduced  to  California 
from  France  in  1854.  Commercial  plantings  began  in  1870,  and 
have  long  since  abundantly  met  all  our  needs  for  this  food ;  pro- 
duction can  easily  be  increased  several  fold  if  desired. 

The  plum  appears  to  be  very  important  commercially  in 
Bulgaria,  plum  butter  being  one  of  the  important  exports.  The 
plum  crop  of  1917  was  reported  to  be  fifty-five  million  pounds. 

THE  CHERRY  is  another  example  of  a  fruit  of  which  a  com- 
paratively small  quantity  suffices  to  meet  the  commercial  needs 
of  the  United  States.  There  are  two  general  classes:  the  sour 
and  the  sweet  cherry.  Unfortunately  the  sweet  cherry  as  grown 
in  the  eastern  part  of  the  United  States  gets  ripe  in  May  and 
June  at  a  season  when  damp  days  and  frequent  thunder  showers 
are  common,  and  fungi  thrive  at  their  best.  The  fruit  of  these 
cherries  is  tender,  so  tender  that  a  fine  crop  on  Saturday  may 
rot  on  the  trees  by  Monday  morning,  and  it  is  difficult  or  im- 
possible to  market  them.  Since  the  drier  summer  of  California 
is,  however,  much  better  suited  to  the  marketing  of  this  crop, 
there  have  been  for  many  years  regular  shipments  of  California 
cherries  into  all  the  Eastern  markets,  although  cherries  of  a 
similar  quality  grow  easily  from  New  England  to  Georgia,  and 
from  the  Atlantic  to  the  Mississippi.  Over  much  of  this  Eastern 
territory  a  kind  of  European  cherry  called  the  mazzard,  some- 
times black  and  sometimes  red  (red-hearts  and  black-hearts), 
grows  wild  in  the  fence  rows,  roadsides,  and  even  occasionally  in 
the  woods.  I  have  seen  single  trees  of  this  species  in  northern 
Virginia  sixty  to  seventy  feet  high,  which  certainly  had  upon 
them  two  hundred  gallons  of  fruit,  most  of  which  rotted  and  fell 
to  the  ground  along  with  the  crop  of  thousands  of  other  trees  in 
many  parts  of  the  Atlantic  slope.  As  these  native  cherries  are 
much  more  resistant  to  decay  than  the  more  delicate  European 
varieties  commonly  grown,  there  would  be  no  difficulty  in  grow- 


THE  PEAR 


405 


ing  this  fruit  for  drying  and  canning  in  large  quantities  if  de- 
sired, but  it  is  not  desired  because  of  the  even  more  easily  grown 
and  more  productive  sour  cherry  of  which  there  are  extensive 
plantings  in  the  New  York  fruit-bolt  and  elsewhere.  They  yield 
so  heavily  and  the  crop  is  so  abundant  that  at  times  it  is  not 
worth  picking. 

The  cherry  crop  of  Wisconsin  gives  an  interesting  example  of 
the  influence  of  climate  on  fruit  crops.  It  is  concentrated  on 
the  little  peninsula  that  projects  between  Lake  Michigan  and  its 
arm,  Green  Bay.  Here  also  apples  and  some  other  fruits  are 
grown  extensively. 

Excellent  cherries  are  grown  in  the  Mediterranean  regions  of 
Europe,  Africa,  and  Asia;  Asia  Minor  being  especially  famed 
for  the  excellence  of  its  cherries. 

THE  PEAR  seems  to  have  gone  out  of  style.  The  chief  reason  for 
this  decline  is  a  villainous  little  bacterial  organism  called  pear 
blight  which  lights  upon  the  pear  tree,  goes  beneath  its  bark  and 
kills  a  twig,  a  branch,  or  even  the  main  trunk  of  the  tree.  This 
pest  has  been  with  us  for  a  century,  shows  no  signs  of  abate- 
ment, and  has  killed  most  of  the  pear  orchards  of  the  United 
States  in  the  last  twenty-five  years.  One  variety  is  almost  exempt 
— the  Kieffer  pear,  a  hybrid  between  the  Chinese  sand  pear  and 
an  American  pear,  probably  the  Bartlett.  The  Chinese  sand 
pear  is  very  hardy.  Its  fruit  has  all  the  delicacy  of  a  spoonful  of 
pure  wet  sand,  partly  hardened,  and  no  more.  The  tree  is  as 
vigorous  as  a  weed.  It  comes  from  the  same  place  that  the  pear 
blight  came  from,  and  is  immune  to  it.  Its  hybrid  offspring, 
the  Kieffer  pear,  is  nearly  immune,  and  the  tree  grows  with  such 
vigor  and  bears  so  abundantly  that  the  fruit  sells  for  a  very  low 
price  in  the  market.  Unfortunately  it  has  such  poor  flavor  that 
it  is  rarely  sold  for  eating;  but  when  properly  handled  it  is 
good  as  a  cooked  fruit  and  if  picked  early  and  kept  in  the  dark 
it  is  edible.  It  is  unfortunate  that  most  of  the  trees  of  good 
varieties  of  pears  have  been  destroyed  by  the  blight.  Other- 
wise we  should  doubtless  have  much  greater  supplies  of  this 
excellent  fruit,  which  can  be  in  the  market  almost  as  large  a 
part  of  the  year  as  the  apple.  Perhaps  in  time  we  may  breed 
new  varieties  immune  to  blight  and  as  good  as  the  tender  and 
almost  lost  varieties  of  Europe. 


CHAPTER  XIX 
THE  CANNING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

THE    CANNING   PROCESS   AND   ITS   SERVICE   TO    MANKIND 

QUEEN  ELIZABETH  was  a  mighty  monarch,  but  millions  of  us  are 
glad  that  we  did  not  have  to  eat  in  her  time.  Many  of  the 
greatest  dietary  benefactions  of  the  race  have  come  since  her 
day — the  peach,  the  orange,  the  banana,  but  especially  the  potato, 
and  canned  foods.  Canned  foods,  particularly  canned  fruits 
and  vegetables,  have  greatly  increased  the  comfort  of  living, 
improved  the  health  of  whole  populations,  and  have  done  much 
to  enlarge  the  capacity  of  the  world  for  supporting  people  in 
comfort  as  well  as  health.  The  process  of  canning  food,  which 
was  discovered  about  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  century,  con- 
sists in  packing  the  food  product,  and  then  cooking  it,  often  above 
the  boiling-point  of  water,  to  destroy  all  bacteria.  It  is  then 
hermetically  sealed  while  still  hot,  and  keeps  almost  indefinitely. 
By  1883  the  methods  of  canning  had  been  so  improved  that 
machinery  did  nearly  all  the  work,  including  the  soldering  of 
the  cans  and  even  the  pasting  and  trimming  of  the  labels.  This 
invention  has  revolutionized  the  food  habits  of  millions. 

Before  the  invention  of  canning,  we  had  to  depend  upon  the 
less  appetizing  and  less  convenient  method  of  drying  fruit  and 
vegetables,  and  four  other  methods  of  very  small  importance: 
preserving  in  salt,  in  vinegar,  in  brandy,  and  in  sugar.  As 
cheap  sugar  is  as  new  as  canning,  the  last  method  wds  of  small 
importance  in  the  past,  and  the  others,  save  drying,  merely 
made  condiments  of  the  fruit. 

Before  the  coming  of  railroads  and  steamboats  and  the  process 
of  canning,  a  crop  of  tomatoes  could  be  consumed  only  within  a 
few  miles  of  the  place  in  which  it  grew  and  within  a  few  days 
from  picking  time.  As  the  tomato  became  ripe  while  the 
farmer's  garden  was  full  of  beans  and  roasting  ears,  and  his 

406 


A  BOON  TO  MAN  407 

orchard  full  of  peaches  and  apples,  it  was  a  very  small  addition 
to  the  usable  food  supply  of  the  race.  That  supply,  like  the 
chain,  had  its  weakest  link,  namely,  the  scarcest  time  of  year ;  it 
came  at  the  end  of  the  crop  season  in  April  and  May,  which  was 
called  starving  time  in  Queen  Elizabeth 's  England  and  for  many 
centuries  before  her  time.  After  transportation  by  rail  and  boat 
was  organized  and  improved,  the  tomatoes  might  be  carried  sev- 
eral hundred  miles,  but  they  still  had  to  be  consumed  within  a 
few  days.  After  the  canning  process  was  perfected  and  developed 
into  an  industry,  the  tomatoes  and  other  perishable  products  of 
field  or  orchard  could  be  preserved  for  consumption  at  any  time 
within  two  or  three  years  and  in  any  corner  of  the  world  to 
which  they  could  be  cheaply  carried.  This  elimination  of  the 
time-limit  on  the  consumption  of  perishable  commodities  has 
revolutionized  agriculture  in  many  localities  by  suddenly  giving 
these  products  access  to  the  world  market.  Instead  of  three  rows 
in  the  garden  the  farmer  can  grow  whole  fields  of  such  crops. 
The  distribution  of  crops  and  of  production  now  depends  on  geo- 
graphic and  economic  conditions  which  make  certain  localities 
best  able  to  produce  certain  products,  rather  than  upon  the  more 
artificial  conditions  that  recently  compelled  their  production 
close  to  the  market  of  the  nearby  city. 

The  change  in  food  supply  is  even  more  marked.  Most  parts 
of  the  world  can  now  have  many  kinds  of  cheap  foods  previously 
unused  or  even  unknown.  The  workers  in  a  paper  mill  in  the 
woods  of  Maine  may  now  eat  the  tomatoes  and  peaches  of  Mary- 
land, the  cherries  of  Wisconsin,  and  the  apricots  of  California. 
The  gold  digger  in  the  Klondike,  the  engineer  on  the  Panama 
Canal,  the  rubber-gatherer  in  the  jungles  of  the  upper  Amazon, 
and  the  whaler  who  spends  a  season  in  the  Arctic  Sea  have  the 
same  opportunity. 

The  recent  discovery  of  silver  in  the  cold  and  inhospitable 
woods  of  upper  Ontario  has  caused  the  building  of  a  railroad 
and  growth  of  a  mining  town  at  Algoma ;  the  fact  that  it  is  now 
far  beyond  the  farm  line  does  not  prevent  this  town  from  having 
a  good  food  supply  of  canned  goods.  A  century  ago,  the  whaler 
after  a  voyage  of  a  year  or  two  often  came  home,  if  he  came  at 
all,  sick  with  scurvy,  a  disease  due  to  dry  food  of  insufficient 
variety.  But  after  Nansen  and  his  men  had  drifted  in  the 


408      THE  CANNING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

Arctic  ice  for  years  in  an  attempt  to  reach  the  North  Pole,  they 
returned  in  perfect  health  because  they  were  nourished  with  all 
kinds  of  canned  and  preserved  meats,  vegetables,  fruits,  fruit 
juices  and  extracts. 

The  Allied  armies  in  France  had  back  of  them  millions,  almost 
uncountable  numbers  of  cans  of  food  in  the  greatest  variety. 
Their  number  was  so  great  that  a  human  being  would  have  died 
before  he  could  count  them  all,  if  they  had  been  spread  out  be- 
fore him.  If  they  were  put  in  a  single  row  they  would  have 
reached  from  the  most  remote  part  of  the  United  States  to  the 
battle  line.  War  owes  a  part  of  its  destructiveness  to  canned 
foods,  because  they  permit  us  to  support  armies  in  greater  num- 
ber and  greater  effectiveness.  In  past  centuries  armies  bred  sick- 
ness, almost  pestilence.  Today  a  well-managed  army  is  one  of 
the  healthiest  groups  of  men  to  be  found  anywhere. 

Canning,  more  than  any  other  invention  since  the  introduction 
of  steam,  has  made  possible  the  building  up  of  towns  and  com- 
munities beyond  the  all  too  narrow  bounds  of  varied  production. 

THE  EXTENT  OF  THE  INDUSTRY 

Practically  all  classes  of  food — fruits,  vegetables,  soups,  fish, 
meat,  and  even  bread,  sweet  potatoes,  and  pudding — are  now 
preserved  by  canning.  The  industry  has  world-wide  distribu- 
tion. It  really  makes  very  little  difference  in  the  final  cost  of 
the  dish  on  our  table  whether  the  canned  pineapple  was  grown 
by  a  grandson  of  Spain  in  Porto  Kico,  a  Japanese  gardener  in 
Hawaii,  or  a  Chinese  immigrant  in  the  environs  of  Singapore. 
In  ordinary  times  the  steamship  carries  the  cases  of  canned  goods 
half-way  round  the  world  at  a  cost  that  adds  little  to  the  price 
of  the  can  the  grocer  hands  over  the  counter  to  us.  We  depend 
on  the  very  ends  of  the  world  not  only  for  the  staple  foods,  but 
for  the  salads  and  desserts.  Rubber  planters  in  Singapore,  espe- 
cially the  Chinese,  find  it  very  profitable  to  plant  pineapples  for 
two  or  three  seasons  between  the  young  rubber  trees.  The  boats 
and  carts  carry  the  pineapples  into  the  nearby  city  of  Singapore, 
whence  about  three-quarters  of  a  million  cases  of  canned  pine- 
apple are  exported  yearly.  In  Hawaii  in  1917  the  United  States 
navy  let  one  contract  for  nearly  two  million  pounds  of  canned 


CANNED  FRUIT  40y 

pineapple,  and  the  total  production  for  the  season  amounted  to 
about  two  and  one-half  million  cases. 

Canned  fruits  and  vegetables  are  an  important  export  from  the 
United  States  to  Great  Britain  and  many  other  countries.  Eng- 
land herself  is  an  important  manufacturer  of  preserved  fruits — 
preserves  being  fruits  so  rich  in  sugar  that  they  will  keep  with- 
out hermetic  sealing.  Certain  brands  of  English  jam  and  pre- 
serves made  from  the  fruits  grown  in  the  south  of  England  and 
even  on  the  mainland  of  Europe  are  known  throughout  the 
world,  are  widely  exported,  especially  to  British  colonies,  and 
are  extensively  consumed  in  Britain,  where  bread  and  jam  is  a 
favorite  combination  of  foods. 

Canned  fruit  pulp  is  imported  in  large  quantities  by  the  Eng- 
lish jam  manufacturers  from  the  Spanish  fruit  districts,  espe- 
cially Malaga,  and  from  Bulgaria  in  peace  times. 

The  Great  War,  which  made  it  necessary  to  keep  men  in  camps 
and  to  replace  cut-off  food  supplies,  brought  about  the  building 
up  of  the  canning  industry  in  nearly  all  of  the  old  centers 
and  many  new  ones.  For  instance  in  the  town  of  Leeton,  New 
South  Wales,  at  the  beginning  of  their  midsummer,  February, 
1918,  a  new  canning  factory  was  being  equipped  with  American 
machinery,  and  was  expected  to  employ  five  hundred  girls  and 
can  five  thousand  tons  of  peaches. 

THE   CANNING   INDUSTRY    IN   THE  UNITED   STATES 

The  canning  factories  of  the  United  States  prepare  yearly 
from  twenty  to  thirty  pounds  of  fruits  and  vegetables  for  each 
man,  woman,  and  child  in  the  country.  We  can  better  appre- 
ciate their  importance  as  food  when  we  remember  that  in  New 
York  City  the  money  spent  for  canned  goods  exceeds  that  spent 
for  the  two  great  staples  of  bread  and  milk  combined.  Among 
the  vegetables  the  tomato  is  most  important,  corn  ranks  second, 
and  peas  and  beans  third,  while  among  the  fruits  the  peach  leads, 
followed  by  pears,  apricots,  and  apples.  The  output  amounted  to 
over  a  hundred  million  dollars  per  year  before  the  war,  and  now 
comes  from  nearly  all  parts  of  the  United  States.  Canning  tends 
to  be  scattered  in  small  towns  wherever  a  surplus  of  some  product 
is  available,  as  in  a  district  of  truck  farms  or  orchards.  Fur- 


410      THE  CANNING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

thermore  a  factory  can  be  operated  on  a  comparatively  small 
scale.  Small  canning  outfits  are  of  many  varieties,  with  capacities 
from  a  few  dozen  cans  a  day  to  several  thousand  a  day.  If  they 
desire,  one  or  two  people  can  from  their  own  gardens  or  orchards 
produce  canned  goods  for  the  market  without  difficulty.  Because 
of  the  seasonal  nature  of  the  supply,  the  labor  is  nearly  all  done 
in  the  summer  time,  often  by  new  immigrants  who  flock  to  the 
country  towns  from  nearby  cities  for  temporary  residence  of  a 
few  weeks  or  months. 

Although  widely  scattered,  the  canning  industry  in  the  United 
States  has  three  distinct  belts  that  show  greater  development 
than  other  regions.  The  first  of  these  regions  to  develop  the 
industry  was  the  Atlantic  Plain.  Maryland  is  the  center  and 
most  important  part  of  this  canning  district,  which  extends  from 
North  Carolina  to  New  York.  This  section  has  become  important 
for  the  same  reasons  that  made  it  important  in  the  shipment  of 
truck  crops  to  the  city  markets,  namely,  an  accessible  location,  a 
good  rainfall,  and  a  sandy  soil  which  is  exceptionally  suited  to 
vegetables,  but  not  well  adapted  to  the  growth  of  other  agricul- 
tural staples  such  as  wheat  and  grass.  Maryland  is  the  leading 
state  in  canning  partly  because  it  has  so  much  suitable  land  and 
partly  because  of  the  many  steamboat  lines  which,  by  centering 
in  Baltimore,  have  made  it  the  only  important  city  center  of 
the  canning  industry  in  the  United  States.  Ordinarily,  can- 
neries are  located  at  small  railway  stations  wherever  a  few  farms 
grow  a  surplus  of  any  crop.  But  the  ease  and  safety  of  navi- 
gation on  the  many  far-reaching  arms  of  the  Chesapeake  give 
Baltimore  remarkable  facilities  for  assembling  farm  products. 
They  are  brought  in  steamboats  from  points  as  far  away  as 
Fredericksburg,  Kichmond,  and  Norfolk,  in  Virginia,  a  great 
number  of  places  on  both  sides  of  the  bay  in  Maryland,  while 
the  Chesapeake  and  Delaware  Canal  opens  a  way  for  the  Balti- 
more fruit  boats  to  go  up  the  navigable  creeks  of  New  Jersey 
to  such  towns  as  Salem  and  Bridgeton. 

The  Baltimore  canneries  have  another  advantage  in  the  fact 
that  oyster  canning  gives  employment  to  both  labor  and  equip- 
ment in  winter  season — a  cost  factor  of  great  importance.  The 
same  combination  of  advantages — sardines  and  other  fish  at  one 
time  of  the  year,  and  vegetables  at  another  time — is  enjoyed  by 


COOL  CLIMATE  AND  CANNING  411 

the  people  of  Brittany,  who  were  busy  during  the  war  in  pre- 
paring supplies  for  the  French  army. 

The  sandy  southern  part  of  Delaware  gives  that  state  an  im- 
portance in  the  canning  industry  quite  disproportionate  to  its 
small  area.  Maryland  and  Delaware  are  important  also  because 
they  are  large  peach-  and  pear-growing  and  fruit-canning  states. 

THE   NEW  YORK,    NEW  ENGLAND,   AND   LAKE  REGION 

New  York,  in  which  both  vegetables  and  fruits  are  grown,  is 
the  center  of  the  northeastern  canning-belt,  the  second  region  of 
great  importance.  This  state  leads  all  the  others  in  the  canning 
of  apples,  pears,  and  corn.  It  is  rather  surprising  that  this  state 
and  the  New  England  States  exceed  the  corn-belt  in  the  canning 
of  corn. 

The  Northern-grown  canned  corn  is  better  than  that  of  the 
corn-belt  proper,  because  in  the  North  with  its  cool  summer  the 
corn  remains  for  a  much  longer  time  in  the  proper  edible  condi- 
tion than  in  hot  Illinois  where  the  plant  rushes  quickly  to 
maturity  and  must  be  gathered  on  the  very  day  it  is  ready.  As 
sugar  corn  for  canning  is  more  valuable  than  common  corn  for 
the  market,  a  small  sugar-corn  crop  on  a  New  York  or  New 
England  farm  is  as  valuable  as  a  somewhat  larger  crop  in 
Illinois. 

The  cooler  summer  that  makes  part  of  New  York,  Michigan, 
and  Wisconsin  rank  as  second-class  corn  producers,  makes  them 
first-class  producers  of  peas.  If  the  same  factory  can  lengthen 
its  season  by  canning  several  kinds  of  fruits  and  vegetables  it  has 
a  great  advantage  through  the  better  utilization  of  the  equip- 
ment. Thus  a  plant  at  Janesville,  Wisconsin,  begins  its  season 
in  June  with  peas,  and  ends  it  late  in  autumn  with  sauerkraut; 
it  usually  packs  the  following,  employing  two  hundred  and  fifty 
to  three  hundred  persons  in  the  height  of  the  season : 

35,000-40,000  cases  peas^rGOO  acres  peas. 
65,000-80,000  cases  corn =1200  acres  sweet  corn. 
50,000  cases  canned  kraut=300  acres  cabbage. 
pickles=900  acres  cucumbers,  75,000-100,000  bushels. 

Northwestern  Ohio  furnishes  a  good  example  of  the  speciali- 
zation of  agriculture  with  reference  to  the  canning  industry. 


412      THE  CANNING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

Near  the  western  end  of  Lake  Erie,  especially  in  Sandusky 
County,  the  black  swamp  land  with  its  mixture  of  sand  is  well 
suited  to  cabbage,  with  the  result  that  there  now  are  six  large 
sauerkraut  factories  within  ten  miles;  and  three  thousand  acres 
of  cabbage  are  annually  grown. 


PACIFIC  COAST 

The  most  important  canning  district  is  in  California.  The 
importance  of  this  state  is  due  to  the  combined  influence  of  the 
climate,  excellent  for  the  growth  of  fruits  and  vegetables,  and 
the  great  distance  from  Eastern  markets,  which  makes  it  possible 
to  ship  in  the  fresh  condition  only  the  early  crop,  constituting 
an  uncertain  fraction,  and  that  the  most  perfect,  of  the  total 
crop.  This  state  cans  nearly  all  the  apricots,  and  many  of  the 
peaches  and  other  fruits,  except  apples  and  berries;  its  output 
of  canned  tomatoes,  peas,  and  asparagus  is  also  very  important. 
In  1916  four  and  one-half  million  cases  of  canned  fruits  and 
vegetables  were  produced.  Each  year  the  industry  is  extended. 
Recently,  new  machinery  for  removing  all  the  dirt  from  tha 
leaves  of  spinach  has  been  perfected,  with  the  result  that  three 
thousand  acres  of  spinach  were  grown  for  canning  alone  in  1918 ; 
most  of  this  supply  was  produced  near  the  city  of  Sacramento. 
The  canning  industry  has  large  possibilities  in  the  other  Pacific 
Coast  states  also. 


THE   POSSIBILITY    OF   INCREASED   PRODUCTION    AND   OF   OVER- 
PRODUCTION 

Talk  of  possible  famine  and  declining  supply  of  fruits  and  vege- 
tables is  so  far  from  truth  that  it  is  almost  laughable.  It  is  true 
that  we  have  had  temporary  shortage  during  the  war,  great  dis- 
turbance of  price  due  to  inflation  of  currency  because  of  the  war, 
and  we  have  been  compelled  to  choose  among  good  things.  Thus 
we  can 't  use  the  same  money  to  buy  a  Liberty  Bond  and  clothes 
in  the  latest  style,  to  buy  rubber  tires  or  gasoline,  and  canned 
peaches.  The  most  conspicuous  feature  of  the  conditions  of  liv- 
ing in  America,  and  to  a  large  extent  also  in  England,  France, 


GLUTTED  MARKETS  413 

and  Germany  during  the  last  twenty-five  years,  has  been  the 
rising  standard  of  living — the  greater  variety  and  amount  of 
goods  used  by  the  people.  Perhaps  the  best  single  example  of 
this  higher  standard  is  the  acquisition  of  some  five  million  auto- 
mobiles by  the  people  of  the  United  States  within  a  very  few 
years,  without  any  appreciable  reduction  in  the  sale  of  any  other 
kind  of  goods,  save  carriages.  Another  example  is  found  in 
the  millions  of  phonographs  in  the  homes  alike  of  workmen  and 
millionaires.  It  is  true  that  we  cannot  indefinitely  increase 
our  acquisitions  in  all  directions.  We  may  have  to  choose 
some  day  between  more  and  more  mechanical  goods  and  more 
and  more  food.  We  hear  a  great  deal  in  these  days  about  de- 
clining food  supply.  As  has  been  pointed  out  elsewhere  in  this 
book,  there  is  increasing  scarcity  of  meat,  there  will  be  increasing 
difficulty  in  the  securing  of  bread,  but  for  a  long  time  to  come 
there  is  no  reason  to  expect  any  important  increase  in  the  actual 
difficulty  of  producing  larger  supplies  of  fruits  and  vegetables. 

Instead  of  undersupply,  the  great  haunting  fear  of  the  grower 
of  fruits  and  vegetables  throughout  the  world  is  oversupply,  the 
glutted  market,  and  crops  for  which  he  cannot  get  the  cost  of 
production.  The  loss  from  limited  market  and  large  crops,  ex- 
plained quite  fully  in  the  case  of  potatoes,  is  even  more  a  danger 
with  peas  and  beans,  tomatoes,  and  all  the  other  garden  stuff. 

The  experience  of  the  cantaloupe  growers  of  the  Imperial 
Valley,  California,  shows  how  the  limiting  factor  works: 

1905          297  carloads  of  cantaloupes  were  shipped 
1900          577        "          "  " 

1907  644        "          "  " 

1908  1891        "          "  "        and  all  growers  lost  money. 

1909  1411        "          "  " 

1910  1621 

1911  2580 
1913 

1914        4490        "    grown  on  8300  acres,  and  all  shippers  lost  money. 

Colorado  was  in  an  equally  bad  situation :  for,  in  the  same  year, 
there  was  one  hundred  per  cent,  increase  to  eight  thousand  acres. 
Many  crates  were  sold  at  thirty-five  and  forty  cents  when  trans- 
portation costs  were  forty-six  cents  a  crate.  During  this  period, 
retail  prices  were  kept  up  by  the  grocers,  and  the  surplus  went 


414      THE  CANNING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

to  the  dump,  even  though  some  of  the  shipping  from  Colorado 
was  done  by  associations  using  the  most  approved  co-operative 
methods. 

An  example  of  large  crop  and  low  income  occurred  in  1890, 
when  we  had  105,000,000  bushels  less  corn  than  in  the  year 
before;  but  the  crop  brought  $21,000,000  more.  In  1912  we 
had  677,000,000  bushels  more  than  in  1913 ;  and  the  crop  brought 
$171,000,000  less. 

The  possibilities  of  increase  in  the  production  of  fruits,  vege- 
tables, and  canned  goods  in  the  United  States  are  very  great — 
provided  there  is  need  for  the  food.  Granted  market,  these 
articles  can  be  produced  in  almost  indefinite  quantity.  Of  the 
sandy  Atlantic  Plain,  so  admirable  for  the  growth  of  small  fruits 
and  truck  crops,  but  a  small  portion  is  now  used  and  the  pro- 
duction is  kept  down  only  by  the  unprofitably  low  prices  which 
result  from  the  rather  frequent  glutting  of  the  market.  If,  for 
example,  the  farmers  of  the  United  States  could  be  assured  of 
a  price  per  bushel  for  tomatoes  for  the  next  ten  years  equal  to 
one-third  of  the  daily  wage  of  a  good  farm  laborer,  it  is  probable 
that  the  production  of  this  fruit  would  be  increased  tenfold, 
for  tomatoes  are  now  commonly  grown  for  less  than  that  price, 
and  occasionally  the  crops  are  so  great  that  the  factories  cannot 
handle  them  and  the  fruit  rots  upon  the  ground  by  the  hundreds 
of  tons.  This  condition  is  a  great  deterrent  to  industry  and 
helps  explain  the  statement  that  half  the  fruits  and  vegetables 
grown  in  the  United  States  never  get  to  market.  A  recent  esti- 
mate by  a  member  of  the  United  States  Department  of  Agricul- 
ture showed  that  about  two  per  cent,  of  the  fine  sandy  loam  of 
Atlantic  Coast  Plain  was  used  for  truck  farming.  This  loam, 
one  of  the  finest  of  truck  soils,  has  a  wide  distribution  for  several 
hundred  miles  up  and  down  the  plain.  But  why  grow  the 
food  if  you  cannot  eat  it  nor  sell  it? 

Mr.  Horace  Roberts,  one  of  the  largest  and  most  successful 
growers  of  fruits  and  vegetables  in  the  world,  operating  more 
than  one  thousand  acres  within  ten  miles  of  Camden,  New  Jersey, 
wrote  in  August,  1915 : 

I  had  hundreds  of  acres  of  cabbages,  peas,  beans,  and  other  vegetables 
this  summer  that  did  not  pay  the  cost  of  gathering  and  marketing,  so 
that  we  lose  our  land,  seeds,  fertilizer,  and  work.  We  are  selling  pota- 


OVERSUPPLY  415 

toes  below  the  cost  of  production.    Gooseberries  and  strawberries  were 
unprofitable. 


If  this  was  happening  to  a  man  who  could  haul  his  own  prod- 
ucts to  market  in  his  own  motor  trucks  it  is  clear  that  growers 
who  had  to  pay  freight  and  accept  lower  prices  because  their 
goods  arrived  in  poorer  condition,  must  have  met  still  greater 
losses. 

Even  with  the  aid  of  the  outlet  afforded  by  canning,  the  small 
fruit  and  vegetable  industries  yield  so  enormously  that  over- 
production, with  its  glutted  markets  and  frequent  losses,  is  a 
factor  which,  like  frost,  is  ever  in  the  mind  of  the  producer  and 
almost  annually  visits  each  locality  of  varied  production. 

A  most  convincing  illustration  of  overproduction  in  agricul- 
ture comes  from  Britain,  which  we  properly  think  of  as  a  chronic 
food  importer  and  jam  user.  ''The  light  soil  of  the  Blairgowrie 
(Perthshire,  Scotland)  district  is  well  adapted  to  the  growing  of 
raspberries  and  strawberries.  In  1900  the  strong  demand  for 
raspberry  pulp  for  jam  manufacture  turned  attention  particu- 
larly to  the  cultivation  of  this  fruit,  and  new  plantations  were 
made.  Raspberry  growing  requires  much  labor,  as  well  as  an 
abundance  of  good  fertilizer,  the  annual  expenditure  for  these 
purposes  exceeding  $100  per  acre.  Plantations  yield  one  and 
one-half  to  four  tons,  or  an  average  of  about  two  and  one-half 
tons  per  acre.  Up  to  1900  the  fruit  was  grown  principally  on 
land  leased  at  the  agricultural  rate  of  $5  to  $7.50  an  acre  per 
annum.  The  large  profits  realized  led  naturally  to  higher  rents, 
which  in  1906  reached  $58  per  acre  for  land  near  the  town  of 
Blairgowrie,  and  $30  per  acre  farther  out.  In  1903  the  price 
of  raspberries  had  been  as  high  at  $209  per  ton,  yielding  enor- 
mous profits  to  the  growers  and  attracting  other  horticulturists 
and  farmers  into  the  flourishing  industry.  In  the  three  succeed- 
ing years  a  profit  of  $195  to  $245  per  acre  was  not  uncommon. 
One  plantation  showed  per  acre  in  that  period  for  one  year: 
Three  tons  of  raspberries,  at  $136  per  ton,  $408;  expenditures, 
including  rent,  $146 ;  net  profit,  $262.  The  value  of  plantations, 
apart  from  the  land,  at  full-bearing  (in  the  fourth  year)  a  few 
years  ago  ranged  from  $195  to  $487  per  acre.  About  one  thou- 
sand acres  in  the  district  were  devoted  to  raspberries  alone,  the 


416      THE  CANNING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

annual  shipments  to  English  jam  factories  exceeding  twenty-five 
hundred  tons. 

"Falling  prices  in  1907  marked  the  beginning  of  the  decline 
of  the  industry.  In  1909  the  supply  largely  exceeded  the  de- 
mand, with  disastrous  results  to  the  growers.  Up  to  1906  the 
average  price  was  about  $112  per  ton.  In  1907  it  fell  to  $92.50, 
in  1908  to  $68,  and  in  1909  to  $44.  Plantations  became  unsal- 
able. Many  fruit-growing  tenants  asked  proprietors  to  take  over 
their  plantations  as  they  stood  (five-year-old  bushes),  without 
payment  of  any  kind,  and  to  let  them  terminate  the  leases,  which 
were  rated  at  only  $24  per  acre.  In  one  case  a  plantation  which 
was  bought  three  years  before  at  $487  per  acre  was  offered  at 
$49.  Land  rents  have  fallen  about  one-half,  which  may  enable 
the  industry  to  recover  in  the  course  of  a  year  or  two  from  its 
present  state  of  collapse.* 

This  is  an  admirable  description  of  the  agricultural  cycle  of 
boom,  overproduction,  and  glut,  which  has  been  repeated  with 
variations  of  detail  thousands  of  times;  for  example,  blackberries 
at  Hammonton,  New  Jersey,  1895-96;  apples  in  British  Colum- 
bia, 1912-15.  Unfortunately  it  will  probably  continue  to  be 
repeated,  for  there  seems  to  be  almost  no  land  that  is  immune. 
In  Valencia,  Spain,  in  May,  1913,  I  found  onions  so  abundant 
from  the  crop  of  the  preceding  season  that  the  pigs  could  not 
eat  them  all.  In  Sicily,  tomatoes,  potatoes,  and  artichokes  are  at 
times  grown  in  unprofitably  large  quantities,  and  overproduction 
of  fruit  and  vegetables  is  common  even  in  China.  Professor 
Joseph  Bailey,  of  the  Department  of  Agriculture,  University  of 
Nankin,  writes: 

I  have  known  onions  to  he  so  plentiful  that  they  could  not  be  sold 
for  even  50  cents  Mexican  gold  (20  cents)  for  a  picul  of  133  pounds. 
This  happens  only  rarely.  The  market  gardeners  around  Shanghai  are 
very  cautious  not  to  overproduce. 

If  we  want  a  hundred-fold  more  canned  spinach,  cabbage, 
tomatoes,  peaches,  or  pineapples,  empty  land  fit  to  produce  them 
awaits  the  hoe  and  the  tractor  of  the  husbandman. 

•United  States  Consular  Report,  1910. 


CHAPTER  XX 
DfiYING   OF   FRUITS   AND   VEGETABLES 

IN  the  drying  of  food,  particularly  of  fruits  and  vegetables,  we 
have  a  source  of  supply  which  was  once  important,  has  declined, 
and  now  promises  to  return  many  fold  with  all  the  force  pro- 
duced by  new  and  better  processes. 

Before  the  coming  of  steam  transportation,  when  the  inhabi- 
tants of  each  locality  lived  to  a  great  extent  upon  the  local 
resources  and  the  farmer's  family  lived  almost  entirely  upon  the 
products  of  the  farm,  the  drying  of  fruits  in  humid  America 
and  Europe  was  almost  as  common  as  their  production.  In  those 
days  the  trays  of  apples,  peaches,  pears,  or  cherries,  on  the 
garden  fence  and  the  back  porch  roof,  were  common  sights 
throughout  the  fruit-growing  world,  and  for  many  centuries  the 
kitchens  of  Europe  and  later  of  America  were  festooned  in  the 
autumn  with  strings  of  dried  pumpkin,  dried  apples,  and  many 
other  kinds  of  dried  food.  These  products  were  dried  in  an 
amateur  way,  under  conditions  ill  suited  to  the  business;  but 
the  food  was  saved,  even  though  the  humidity  and  summer 
thunder  showers  of  damp  climates  made  it  very  dark  and  un- 
attractive and  sometimes  of  really  inferior  quality.  This  home 
industry  has  declined  like  so  many  other  home  industries,  be- 
cause of  the  superiority  of  the  factory  product  and  the  advan- 
tages of  production  in  locations  where  the  climate  is  very  favor- 
able. Steam  transportation  and  world  commerce  have  worked 
a  quick  revolution  by  developing  a  large  traffic  in  dried  fruits 
from  those  parts  of  the  world  having  the  favorable  conditions 
for  their  production. 

AN  INDUSTRY  SHIFTED   BY   SUNSHINE 

For  a  few  decades  it  has  been  easier  to  dry  fruit  in  the  sunny 
and  rainless  summer  of  countries  having  the  Mediterranean  type 

41? 


418          DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

of  climate  and  to  ship  it  great  distances  than  to  combat  the 
difficulties  of  drying  it  at  home  with  artificial  heat  in  evapo- 
rators or  in  the  sun  between  showers.  The  only  exception  was 
the  drying  of  apples,  a  by-product  industry  suffering  from  the 
competition  of  the  commerce  in  fresh  fruit,  and  still  most  exten- 
sively carried  on  in  the  Eastern  apple  districts,  especially  New 
York,  from  which  state  thousands  of  barrels  of  dried  apples  have 
been  sent  to  Europe,  chiefly  to  Germany,  Holland,  and  Belgium, 
where  they  are  used  for  food  and  for  the  making  of  wine.  From 
some  isolated  farming  districts  in  the  Appalachian  Mountains 
and  the  southern  and  eastern  parts  of  the  United  States,  there 
are  still  small  shipments  of  dried  peaches,  apples,  cherries,  and 
even  dried  blackberries  laboriously  prepared  over  the  kitchen 
stove  or  on  trays  in  the  sun,  but  the  humid  air  and  the  cloudy 
days  with  occasional  showers  blacken  these  products,  so  that 
they  bring  a  low  price  in  the  market. 

In  almost  any  grocery  store  in  the  United  States  today,  boxes 
of  dried  prunes,  apricots,  peaches,  dates,  raisins,  figs,  and  cur- 
rants may  be  seen,  and  the  names  and  addresses  stamped  on  the 
boxes  will  show  that  they  have  come  into  these  American  com- 
munities from  many  distant  parts  of  the  world,  nearly  always 
from  districts  with  a  long  dry  summer,  in  which  fruit  exposed 
on  trays  beside  the  trees  is  dried  by  the  constant  sunshine  with 
great  ease  and  no  labor  except  piling  the  trays  and  covering  them 
on  those  rare  occasions  when  rain  threatens. 

COMPETITION   OF   CALIFORNIA   WITH   SOUTHERN   EUROPE 

California  names  predominate  in  the  list  of  addresses  on 
dried-fruit  boxes,  although  thirty  years  ago  the  labels  usually 
showed  European  names.  These  industries  grew  up  first  in 
southern  Europe  and  have  very  recently  come  to  southern  Cali- 
fornia, where  they  have  developed  with  surprising  rapidity  and 
now  supply  almost  the  entire  home  market  and  a  surplus  of  some 
varieties  for  export.  The  total  product  of  dried  fruit  in  this 
state  alone  amounted  to  260,000  tons  in  1912,  but  had  increased 
to  340,000  tons  in  1917  (raisins,  147,000;  prunes,  109,000; 
peaches,  38,000;  apricots,  16,000;  apples,  8,000;  figs,  8,000,  and 
various  others,  4,000).  One  of  the  first  California  dried  fruits 


RAISINS 


419 


to  compete  with  those  of  Europe  was  the  raisin.  This  highly 
nutritious  food  had  for  centuries  been  produced  only  in  the 
Mediterranean  region.  There  had  been  an  important  export 
from  Almeria,  in  eastern  Spain,  where  the  peasants  for  genera- 


Fio.  118. — A  rainless  summer  permits  fruit  to  be  dried  upon  trays  in 
the  orchard  and  helps  to  locate  the  dried  fruit  industry.  California 
scene.  (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

tions  have  kept  vineyards  and  dried  the  grapes.  Sultana  raisins, 
produced  from  a  seedless  variety  of  grape,  come  from  the  east- 
ern Mediterranean  coast,  the  chief  center  being  Smyrna,  in  Asia 
Minor,  with  other  centers  of  production  on  the  Greek  Islands  in 
the  JEgean  Sea,  and  to  a  lesser  extent  in  Greece  itself.  In  1880 
the  United  States  took  1,200,000  boxes  of  Malaga  raisins  alone, 


420  DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

but  in  1804  the  crop  of  California  raisins,  which  had  been 
grown  first  in  1870,  had  become  great  enough  to  supply  the  needs 
of  the  United  States.  As  long  as  the  United  States  was  import- 
ing some  raisins  from  Spain,  California  growers  had  the  advan- 
tage of  a  tariff  (usually)  and  the  freight  rate  across  the  Atlantic. 
When  they  oversupplied  the  home  market,  they  lost  the  tariff 
advantage  and  suddenly  found  their  price  set  by  the  European 
market,  minus  the  freight  to  it.  For  a  time  there  was  depression 
and  despair  among  the  Californians,  especially  around  Fresno, 
where  the  greater  number  of  the  raisins  are  grown.  Diligent 
advertising  has,  however,  greatly  increased  the  consumption  of 
the  raisin,  which  is  peculiarly  valuable  in  a  period  of  sugar 
shortage,  because  the  fruit  is  not  considered  ripe  until  it  has 
twenty-three  to  thirty-four  per  cent,  of  sugar.  To  make  raisins 
grapes  are  picked,  laid  upon  wooden  trays,  and  exposed  to  the 
sun  from  ten  to  twelve  days. 

The  second  dried  fruit  of  importance  in  the  California  district 
is  the  prune,  which  has  long  been  exported  from  several  Medi- 
terranean districts,  chiefly  France,  where  Tours  is  the  best- 
known  center  of  production.  Italy  ranks  second  in  prune  pro- 
duction, and  Germany  produces  some  prunes  for  home  consump- 
tion. They  are  also  grown  in  Spain  and  the  Balkans,  especially 
Bosnia  and  Servia.  The  recent  large  export  to  the  United  States 
has  almost  entirely  ceased,  and  European  fruit  growers  must 
depend  chiefly  upon  the  European  market,  to  which  American 
prunes  now  go  in  years  of  European  crop  shortage.  The  Ameri- 
can prune  is  by  no  means  limited  to  California ;  it  grows  also  in 
Oregon,  "Washington,  and  Idaho.  The  increase  in  production 
has  been  striking.  In  1880  it  was  200,000  pounds;  in  1890, 
16,000,000  pounds,  with  an  import  of  about  five  times  that  quan- 
tity. By  1900  the  American  capacity  was  130,000,000  pounds 
and  the  limit  was  set  not  by  land  but  by  market.  In  comparison 
with  canned  fruit,  the  dried  fruit  has  the  disadvantage  of  becom- 
ing wormy  in  summer,  unless  carefully  protected,  but  it  is  much 
more  concentrated  and  more  easily  transported  than  canned  fruit. 
Prunes  in  large  quantities  go  from  California  in  steamships  to 
the  Eastern  States  and  Europe. 


ASIAN  APRICOTS  421 

THE   APRICOT   AS   AN   EXAMPLE   OF   DRIED   FRUIT   TRADE 

In  the  United  States  this  early  blooming  fruit  is  a  good  crop 
only  in  California,  where  enough  apricots  are  produced  to  supply 
the  whole  country  with  dried  apricots  for  the  whole  year  and  a 
few  fresh  ones  during  the  early  months  of  summer.  Some,  both 
fresh  and  dried,  are  also  exported.  The  apricot  is  grown  in 
many  other  parts  of  the  world.  In  the  date  oases  of  the  Sahara 
it  thrives  beneath  the  partial  shade  of  the  thin  leaves  of  the  date 
palm ;  dried  apricots  are  an  important  ingredient  of  the  ragout 
which  is  so  large  a  part  of  the  diet  of  the  almost  vegetarian  oases 
dwellers.  It  is  also  grown  in  northern  India.  Caravans  toil  over 
the  snowy  and  perilous  Himalayas  carrying  the  dried  fruit  to 
Thibet  and  western  China,  where  the  product  is  greatly  prized. 

The  communities  of  central  Asia  afford  a  good  example  of  the 
effect  of  dry  climate  and  good  transportation  facilities  on  the 
fruit  industry.  The  Russian  Government,  after  its  conquests  in 
central  Asia,  built  a  railroad  connecting  the  Black  Sea  with  the 
Caspian.  A  line  of  steamers  on  the  Caspian  Sea  connected  at 
the  port  of  Krasnovodsk  with  another  railroad  that  crosses  the 
desert  to  the  oases  of  Bokhara,  Khiva,  and  Samarkand.  These 
are  densely  peopled  communities  living  upon  lands  where 
streams  fed  by  the  snows  upon  central  Asian  mountains  permit 
the  irrigation  of  a  few  square  miles  of  the  level  plain.  These 
newly  conquered  cities  on  the  oases  are  among  the  oldest  settle- 
ments in  the  world.  Before  Rome  was  built,  these  cities  were 
carrying  on  a  caravan  trade  in  valuable  products,  like  metal 
work,  silk,  wool,  rugs,  leather,  skins,  and  tea.  The  cheaper  rates 
on  the  new  Russian  railroad  made  it  possible  for  these  regions 
to  become  in  part  the  California  of  the  Russian  realm.  Within 
a  few  years  dried  apricots  which  had  been  a  local  food  supply 
for  millenniums  became  an  important  export  to  Russia. 

THE  FIG 

Commercially  the  fig  is  a  sub-tropic  product  but  the  tree  is 
hardier  than  the  orange  tree.  It  grows  over  most  of  southern 
Europe  and  even  survives  in  sheltered  places  in  England,  Texas, 
and  many  parts  of  the  southern  United  States.  Nevertheless 


422          DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

the  growing  of  figs  was  successfully  established  in  California 
only  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century.  For  many  years 
the  trees  had  grown  well  but  bore  no  fruit  because  of  the  absence 
of  a  certain  insect  that  lives  in  Mediterranean  lands,  and  crawls 
into  the  hollow  cavity  of  the  fig  and  fertilizes  the  many  blossoms 
therein  contained.  The  establishment  of  fig  growing  in  Cali- 
fornia waited  for  the  successful  acclimatization  of  the  insect, 
which  was  difficult  and  required  many  expensive  attempts.  The 
industry  in  the  large  sense  is  still  an  Old  World  industry.  Fig 
drying,  during  which  sugar  exudes  from  the  fruit  and  clings 
upon  it  in  white  particles,  has  until  the  present  time  had  its 
chief  commercial  center  in  Turkey  and  Asia  Minor,  where  in 
the  valley  around  Smyrna  figs  are  largely  produced,  making 
Smyrna  the  best  fig  market  in  the  world.  The  process  of  drying 
figs  is  not  difficult,  and  they  are  an  important  crop  along  the 
Mediterranean  from  one  end  to  the  other.  They  are  exported 
largely  from  the  hill  country  of  northeastern  Algeria.  In  the 
Balearic  Islands  alcohol  is  distilled  from  figs,  and  the  residue  is 
fed  to  pigs.  In  the  region  around  Malaga  an  important  local 
food  supply  suddenly  became  an  important  export  because  of 
the  shutting  off  of  the  Turkish  supply  by  the  war.  In  the 
United  States  and  most  cool  countries,  the  fig  is  used  as  a 
sweetmeat,  but  it  is  a  standard  article  of  diet  in  many  lands 
having  the  Mediterranean  type  of  climate.  It  is  so  abundant 
in  Chile  that,  although  its  nutritive  value  is  high,  it  is  in  some 
localities  considered  food  for  beggars. 

THE    DATE    AND    ITS    IMPORTANCE    IN    DESERT    COUNTRIES 

The  greatest  of  all  dried  fruits,  in  its  service  to  mankind,  is 
the  date,  and  the  date  tree  is  the  king  of  all  crops.  The  fruit, 
which  is  more  nutritious  than  beef  (see  table  of  food  values),  is 
produced  by  a  tall  palm  growing  in  many  hot  arid  lands.  It 
is  the  bread  of  the  desert,  and  also  food  for  the  beasts.  Even 
milch  cows  in  Oman,  Arabia,  are  fed  principally  on  dried  fish 
and  refuse  date  kernels.  The  date  is  called  a  tree  of  the  desert, 
but  it  really  requires  much  water,  and  is  a  tree  of  the  oasis. 
Underground  streams  of  water  occasionally  reach  the  surface  in 
the  Sahara  Desert,  either  by  natural  flow  or  by  pumping,  and 


THE  GARDEN  OF  EDEN  423 

create  most  fertile  oases.  These  are  often  carefully  cultivated 
and  support  a  surprisingly  dense  population. 

"Now  as  for  the  last  five  or  ten  thousand  seasons,  the  date- 
tree  owner  begins  his  year's  work  in  the  springtime  by  climbing 
his  tall  trees  to  fertilize  their  blossoms.  The  ascent  is  easy  be- 
cause of  the  natural  steps  furnished  by  the  notchings  left  by  the 
stubs  of  the  leaves  of  past  years.  The  blossoms  of  the  fruitful 
female  palms  are  fertilized  by  a  dust  of  pollen  shaken  from  a 
sprig  of  male  flowers  in  the  hand  of  the  husbandman.  This 
economical  device  permits  a  very  small  proportion  of  male  trees 
to  suffice  and  the  garden  can  be  filled  to  crowding  with  the  pro- 
ductive female  trees.  Once  the  blooms  are  fertilized,  little  more 
is  done  for  the  tree  but  watering  at  rather  frequent  intervals, 
and  this  is  often  a  light  task,  the  mere  diversion  of  a  stream. 
Many  of  the  palms  are  cultivated  only  one  year  in  three,  but 
with  this  small  labor  they  are  heavy  yielders.  The  open  feathery 
palm  leaves  permit  much  light  to  filter  through,  so  that  oranges, 
figs,  and  apricots  grow  beneath  the  palms,  and  garden  vegetables 
can  grow  among  these  lesser  fruit  trees.  The  vegetables  pay  the 
cost,  the  rest  is  profit,  hence  the  oasis  garden  sells  for  a  very  high 
price. 

"Thus  the  date  garden  leads  all  other  kinds  of  agriculture  in 
the  amount  of  food  produced,  and  this  tree  merits  the  title  of 
King  of  Crops.  Small  wonder  that  the  prehistoric  Semite  called 
it  sacred.  Pound  for  pound,  the  date  is  as  nutritious  as  bread, 
and  the  harvest  is  three  to  twenty-fold  that  of  wheat.  After  a 
score  of  years  or  less,  the  best  wheat  lands  are  usually  exhausted 
by  continuous  production ;  but  we  know  that  certain  oases  have 
yielded  dates  regularly  since  they  were  visited  and  described  by 
Roman  writers,  a  score  of  centuries  ago.  They  are  today  so 
prized  that  the  Arab  owner  will  refuse  $5,000  in  gold  for  an 
acre  of  good  date  garden.  Its  yield  warrants  the  valuation.  In 
May  the  oasis  housetops  beside  the  date  garden  are  covered  with 
drying  apricots;  in  July  and  again  in  September  the  figs  are 
drying;  in  late  autumn  comes  the  great  event  of  the  year,  the 
date  harvest."* 

The  scattered  oasis  locations  make  possible  the  caravan  routes 

'Smith,  J.  Russell:  "The  Agriculture  of  the  Garden  of  Eden,"  Atlantic 
Monthly,  August,  1914,  p.  258. 


424          DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

which  cross  the  great  deserts  from  oasis  to  oasis.  Millions  of 
date  trees  yield  the  chief  crop,  both  supply  crop  and  money  crop, 
throughout  Sahara  and  Arabia.  The  French  Government  has 
recently  built  railroads  across  the  Tell,  or  fertile  agricultural 
plain  which  faces  the  Mediterranean  throughout  the  whole  coast 
of  North  Africa  and  Tunis,  through  the  Atlas  Mountains,  with 
their  pastures  and  cork  forests,  down  the  oases  in  the  edge  of 
the  Sahara.  To  these  railroad  termini  the  dates  are  brought  by 
camel  caravans  from  many  other  oases  and  are  shipped  by  rail 
to  Tunis  and  Algiers,  thence  by  steamer  to  Marseilles  for  dis- 
tribution to  many  lands. 

The  date  grows  through  the  desert  parts  of  North  Africa  and 
Western  Asia  as  far  as  Persia.  It  is  the  chief  export  from  the 
little  independent  Sultanate  of  Oman  in  southeastern  Arabia, 
whose  arid  coasts  look  like  the  desert  itself  and  whose  population 
and  products  are  to  be  found  in  the  irrigated  fields  of  a  few 
inland  valleys  where  the  date  tree  enables  the  Arabs  to  have 
food  and  also  purchase  the  goods  left  at  Muscat  by  the  steamships 
from  England,  France,  Germany,  Italy,  and  America. 

In  Southern  Persia,  a  land  of  aridity  and  oases,  the  date,  as  in 
Morocco  and  Algeria,  is  one  of  the  important  food  products,  but 
Mesopotamia  is  at  the  present  time  the  chief  source  of  the  world's 
commercial  supply  of  dates.  To  the  city  of  Bagdad  with  its 
river  steamers  and  to  Basra  with  its  ocean  steamers,  caravans 
of  camels  and  mules  bring  the  dates  (worth,  before  the  war, 
three  to  four  cents  per  pound)  for  shipment  by  steamer  to  the 
Western  World.  The  war  interfered  with  the  supply  of  dates 
very  much  as  it  interfered  with  the  supply  of  figs. 

INTRODUCTION   OF  THE  FIG  AND  DATE  TO  THE  UNITED  STATES 

There  is  good  prospect  that  before  many  decades  we  shall  be 
as  independent  of  the  Old  World  for  a  supply  of  dates  as  we 
have  already  become  for  a  supply  of  raisins  and  prunes,  the 
product  of  plants  more  easy  of  reproduction,  but  also  more 
short-lived  than  is  the  majestic  date  palm.  The  date  tree,  like 
the  fig  and  the  olive,  has  been  found  to  grow  well  in  southwestern 
United  States,  where  the  climatic  conditions  resemble  those  of 
western  Asia  and  the  Sahara.  The  American  date  region  is 


THE  AMERICAN  EGYPT  425 

limited  to  the  basin  of  the  lower  Colorado  in  Arizona  and  south- 
eastern California,  and  possibly  a  small  territory  in  the  tip  of 
Texas  along  the  lower  Rio  Grande.  The  greatest  single  tract 
of  date  land  is  the  Imperial  Valley,  which  greatly  resembles  in 
climate  the  delta  at  the  mouth  of  the  Nile,  and  is  sometimes 
described  as  having  eleven  months  summer  and  one  month  of 
late  spring.  Here  the  almost  continuous  sunshine  and  blazing 
heat  and  the  abundant  waters  of  the  Colorado  River  give  the 
proper  conditions  for  the  date  which  have  been  described  by  the 
Arabs  as  "having  its  feet  in  the  water  and  its  head  in  the  fires 
of  heaven."  Date  culture  has  scarcely  passed  the  experimental 
stage  in  the  United  States,  but  the  results  are  very  premising. 
It  is  easily  possible  that  the  American  imports  of  these  Old 
World  desert  fruits  will  be  reversed  as  was  our  import  trade  in 
prunes,  raisins,  and  apricots,  of  which  we  now  export  a  surplus, 
which  amounted  as  long  ago  as  1911  to  prunes,  $3,300,000; 
raisins,  $1,000,000 ;  apricots,  $2,100,000. 

EACH    CONTINENT    HAS   A   NATURAL   DRIED   FRUIT    DISTRICT 

Since  each  continent  has  its  region  of  summer  drought  and 
irrigation  there  is  prospect  of  world  competition  in  dried  fruits 
as  other  countries  of  the  world  become  better  developed.  In 
the  Australian  state  of  Victoria,  for  example,  the  well-known 
colony  of  Mildura  on  the  Murray  River  has  under  irrigation  a 
quarter  of  a  million  acres  of  land  under  the  same  kind  of  sunny 
climate  that  prevails  in  California,  Spain,  and  Asia  Minor,  and 
the  people  are  already  producing  dried  prunes,  dried  peaches, 
dried  apricots,  dried  currants,  and  raisins  for  the  Australian 
market,  and  occasionally  exporting  them  to  Great  Britain,  where 
they  compete  with  the  products  of  the  Mediterranean  countries 
and  California. 

South  Africa  is  engaged  to  a  limited  extent  in  producing  the 
same  crops,  while  Chile  has  her  California  on  the  plains  and 
irrigated  fields  near  Valparaiso  and  Santiago.  Over  the  Andes 
from  these  Chilean  orchards  are  the  settlements  of  San  Juan 
and  Mendoza  in  Argentina  producing  raisins,  dried  fruit,  and 
wine  for  that  country.  The  South  Americans  have  as  yet  ex- 
ported no  dried  fruits  worth  mentioning,  but  the  natural  re- 


426          DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

sources  are  there,  awaiting  the  labor  and  care  of  man.  Guar- 
anteed a  moderate  price,  there  is  no  reason  why  the  production 
of  all  the  dried  fruits  might  not  increase  many  fold  without  any 
serious  increase  in  the  amount  of  effort  and,  therefore,  in  rela- 
tive cost  of  production. 

DEHYDRATED  VEGETABLES 

While  the  ancients  and  also  our  grandmothers  dried  fruit  and 
some  vegetables  successfully  in  the  sun  or  around  the  kitchen 
fire,  they  made  out  but  poorly  with  vegetables.  In  the  last  few 
years  new  processes  of  drying  commonly  called  dehydration  have 
been  perfected.  Their  utilization  promises  revolutions  greater 
even  than  that  caused  by  canning  vegetables,  for  the  reason  that 
it  seems  to  do  all  that  canning  will  do,  and  do  it  more  cheaply, 
thereby  opening  the  way  for  abundant  food  supply  for  greater 
numbers  of  people  at  little  expense.  The  process  of  dehydration 
is  surprisingly  simple.  It  consists  in  exposing  the  leaves  of  cab- 
bag,  lettuce,  or  spinach,  slices  of  potatoes,  even  juicy  tomatoes, 
to  a  current  of  air  at  comparatively  low  temperature,  but  driven 
rather  rapidly  by  fans  which  cause  it  to  take  off  the  moisture  and 
leave  the  fruit  ready  to  absorb  water  again  at  the  first  oppor- 
tunity, and  resume  to  a  surprising  degree  its  original  color,  bulk, 
and  flavor.  It  has  all  the  time  kept  its  nutritive  value  and  its 
vitamines,  less  disturbed  than  when  canned,  because  not  sub- 
jected to  the  injurious  influence  of  great  heat.  The  chief  trouble 
with  dehydrated  vegetables  now  is  not  their  quality,  price, 
supply,  or  nutritive  value,  but  the  conservatism  of  all  of  us  who 
are  instinctively  prejudiced  against  a  new  article  of  diet.  The 
ups  and  downs  and  possibilities  of  the  vegetable  food  supply  and 
of  dried  vegetables  are  well  illustrated  by  the  case  of  the  tomato 
as  told  by  David  Fairchild,  in  the  National  Geographic  Magazine, 
April,  1918,  as  follows: 

"Fifty  years  ago  we  refused  to  eat  the  tomato  because  we 
believed  it  was  poisonous;  then  we  became  so  fond  of  it  that 
we  demanded  it  both  in  and  out  of  season,  even  though  it  had 
to  be  grown  thousands  of  miles  from  our  markets,  in  the  South 
or  under  glass.  And  for  our  epicurean  tastes  we  paid  exorbi- 
tant prices. 


DRIED  TOMATOES  427 

"Then  we  learned  to  can  this  vegetable  in  great  factories,  and 
because  we  want  our  tomatoes  stewed  instead  of  as  a  sauce  for 
macaroni  or  rice,  we  insist  that  the  vast  majority  of  our  put-up 
product  shall  be  in  form  for  immediate  use — emergency  ration 
shape;  in  other  words,  canned  without  being  concentrated  into 
paste,  which  is  the  way  the  Italians  use  their  tomato  flavor. 
In  this  dilute  form  360,000,000  cans  of  tomatoes  are  shipped  over 
the  country. 

"There  are  two  pounds  one  ounce  of  tomatoes  in  a  can,  or  a 
trifle  over  1.8  cents'  worth,  and  in  a  case  of  twenty-four  cans, 
which  sells  for  $4,  approximately  43  cents'  worth  of  tomatoes  as 
picked  in  the  field. 

"This  not  only  means  that  we  ship  the  tin  cans  in  which  the 
canned  tomatoes  are  contained,  but  that  we  first  ship  the  same 
number  of  tin  cans  from  the  factory  where  they  are  made  to 
the  cannery  where  they  are  filled. 

"We  have  never  learned  and  have  never  had  to  learn,  until 
war's  necessities  forced  the  matter  to  our  attention,  that  the 
tomato  can  be  successfully  sliced  and  dried;  that  it  retains 
its  characteristic  flavor  and  aroma  when  so  dried;  that 
when  soaked  in  water  for  four  or  six  hours  it  comes  back 
and  makes  a  delicious  sauce  or  soup,  slightly  sweeter  than 
the  canned  tomato.  For  many  of  the  ordinary  uses  of  the 
household  the  dried  tomato  is  as  satisfactory  as  the  canned 
product. 

"One  ton  of  good  tomatoes,  after  peeling,  trimming,  and 
packing  in  cans,  will  weigh  approximately  2,300  pounds  when 
crated  for  shipment,  whereas  the  same  quantity,  when  dried  and 
boxed,  is  reduced  to  only  200  pounds,  or  about  one-twelfth  as 
much.  In  bulk  the  saving  depends  upon  whether  the  slices  are 
compressed  or  not. 

"If  left  loose  in  the  packages,  the  equivalent  of  ten  carloads 
of  the  canned  tomatoes  could  be  packed  in  a  single  car,  and  when 
the  car  space  required  for  moving  the  empty  tin  cans,  block  tin, 
and  packing-case  materials  is  considered,  this  number  of  cars  is 
practically  doubled. 

"Likewise,  cabbage  and  its  fermented  product,  sauerkraut, 
can  be  dried  successfully  and  brought  back  without  losing  their 
flavor.  In  a  trial  at  one  of  the  army  hospitals  five  pounds  of 


428          DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

dried  cabbage  formed  a  ration  for  four  hundred  and  twenty- 
eight  men. 

"Dried  carrots,  beets,  peas,  and  string-beans  are  practically 
indistinguishable  from  the  fresh ;  spinach,  which  is  so  often  taste- 
less when  canned,  turnips,  onions,  cauliflower,  Brussels  sprouts, 
mushrooms,  squash,  pumpkins,  and  parsnips — all  are  success- 
fully dried,  particularly  so  by  the  newer  and  better-regulated 
power-fan  drying  processes  which  have  been  adapted  and  in- 
vented by  various  American  drying  firms. 

"These  commercial  products  are  more  uniform  and  of  much 
more  attractive  appearance  than  the  home-dried  products,  taken 
as  a  class,  for  the  reason  mainly  that  they  are  dried  more  rapidly, 
under  more  carefully  controlled  conditions  of  moisture  and  heat; 
and  when  put  into  water  they  come  back  to  almost,  if  not  quite, 
their  original  dimensions  and  appearance.  .  .  . 

"The  evident  advantages  of  purchasing  dried  vegetables  in- 
stead of  fresh  vegetables  are  that  they  will  save  the  householder 
the  labor  of  preparation  in  the  kitchen,  for  they  are  all  peeled 
and  sliced  and  have  only  to  be  soaked  before  cooking ;  they  will 
lessen  the  weight  of  her  market  basket  by  the  water  that  has 
been  taken  out,  which  varies  from  fifty  to  eighty-five  per  cent., 
and  also  by  the  absence  of  the  peeling  and  tops;  they  will  keep 
indefinitely  if  protected  from  moisture  and  insect  contamination ; 
they  will  lessen  her  garbage ;  when  out  of  season  they  will  cost 
less  than  the  fresh  and  much  less  than  the  canned  at  any  time, 
and  they  will  insure  for  the  children,  at  all  times  of  the  year, 
the  'fat  soluble  A'  and  the  'water  soluble  B,'  both  essential 
to  growth. 

"It  would  be  fortunate  if  the  time  were  soon  to  come  when  the 
drying  of  vegetables  by  means  of  drying  plants  of  suitable  size, 
with  adequate  safeguarding  appliances,  should  be  a  local  in- 
dustry wherever  vegetables  are  grown.  The  result  would  be  a 
stabilizing  of  prices  of  those  perishables  which  are  so  often 
grown  at  a  loss  because  of  overproduction  or  a  faulty  system 
of  distribution.  .  .  . 

"What  is  needed  now,  however,  is  concerted  effort  to  induce 
the  American  public  to  use  dried  vegetables,  really  to  want  them, 
and,  having  once  tried  them,  continue  to  use  them.  The  demand 
will  bring  the  product,  and  this  product  may  be  expected  to 


DRIED  VEGETABLES  429 

improve  in  quality  and  attractiveness  as  the  art  develops,  just 
as  has  been  the  case  with  every  other  food  which  American  in- 
genuity has  developed. 

"When  fresh  vegetables  go  too  high  for  your  pocketbook,  buy 
the  dehydrated  ones,  which  have  the  same  food  value  and  are 
more  convenient,  and  as  time  goes  on  the  demand  so  created  for 
a  product  which  is  so  pre-eminently  economical  and  good  will 
become  a  regular  part  of  our  diet  and  we  will  not  any  more 
question  *  the  dried  vegetable  than  we  do  today  the  canned  vege- 
tables, or  the  dried  apricot,  fig,  apple,  prune,  or  raisin.  .  .  . 

"Old  prejudices  die  hard,  but  we  are  now  eating  some  things 
which  our  forefathers  scorned  or  of  which  they  had  never  heard. 
They  were  unfamiliar  with  celery  and  with  olives.  They  did  not 
dream  of  the  grape-fruit,  nor  the  soy  bean,  nor  the  wild  rice  of 
Minnesota,  nor  the  kafir  corn,  nor  the  cassaba  melon,  nor  the 
avocado,  nor  the  banana,  nor  the  Chinese  cabbage — all  these  and 
scores  more  have  come  into  our  dietary  within  the  last  genera- 
tion, not  to  mention  the  arrival  of  the  whole  canned  fruit  and 
vegetable  galaxy,  with  its  bewildering  variety  of  flavors  and 
colors.  .  .  . 

"When  once  we  learn  to  like  dried  vegetables — and  if  they  are 
properly  dried  and  properly  cooked  they  taste  so  nearly  like  the 
fresh  ones  as  to  be  almost  indistinguishable — there  will  be  un- 
locked vast  storehouses  of  food  in  the  sweet-potato  areas  of  the 

* "  There  is,  no  doubt,  much  to  be  learned  in  the  kitchen  about  the 
handling  of  dried  products.  They  are  not  to  be  handled  as  though  they 
were  fresh  vegetables,  and  they  require  a  different  treatment  from  the 
vegetables  which  have  stood  for  months  in  the  water  of  a  tin  can.  The 
moisture  has  been  almost  entirely  taken  out  of  them,  and  it  requires  time 
for  this  moisture  to  be  reabsorbed.  This  process  takes  from  six  to  twenty- 
four  hours,  and  cannot  well  be  hurried. 

"  Then  the  cooking  should  be  slowly  done,  approximating  in  this  respect 
the  process  of  the  fireless  cooker.  In  the  drying  operation  some  of  the 
flavor  is  lost,  but  in  many  vegetables  there  is  a  surplus  of  flavor  anyway. 
The  cabbage  and  cauliflower,  the  turnip  and  carrot,  the  tomato  and  onion 
are  strong  enough  to  lose  a  little  of  their  flavor  without  detriment.  But 
in  cooking,  the  vessels  in  which  the  dried  vegetables  are  prepared  should 
be  kept  closed  and  as  little  steam  as  possible  allowed  to  escape. 

"  The  tendency  to  be  guarded  against  is  that  of  having  the  vegetable  too 
concentrated — adding  too  little  water  or  allowing  too  much  water  to 
escape  in  the  form  of  steam. 

"  The  most  serious  difficulty  which  attends  the  introduction  of  the  dried 
vegetable  is  not  different  from  that  which  attends  the  introduction  of  any 
new  food.  The  danger  is  that  the  first  attempt  at  cooking  may  be  unsuc- 
cessful, and  this  failure  be  taken  as  a  fair  trial  and  the  product  con- 
demned as  not  fit  to  eat,  when  in  reality  the  fault  lies  in  its  preparation." 


430          DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

South  and  equally  vast  supplies  of  Irish  potatoes  in  the  North, 
now  threatened  with  complete  or  partial  loss. 

"It  is  extremely  difficult  to  predict  the  course  of  events  in 
any  change  of  human  habit.  Could  Sir  John  Hawkins  have 
dreamed,  when  he  introduced  a  Peruvian  tuber  as  a  curiosity 


FIG.  119. — Dehydrated  mixed  vegetables  as  manufactured  for  British 
and  American  armies.  Compare  the  ease  of  handling  this  and  the  green 
vegetables  themselves.  This  one  Pacific  coast  firm  prepared  twenty-five 
million  pounds  of  food  in  four  years  for  Allied  armies.  (Dominion 
Products  Limited,  Vancouver,  British  Columbia.) 

into  Ireland,  that  his  great-great-great  grandchild  (if  he  has 
one)  would  see  155,000,000  bushels  of  potatoes  produced  in  that 
island  alone?" 

Dried  vegetables  were  extensively  used  in  the  Allied  armies 
in  the  latter  part  of  the  war.  The  shortage  of  shipping  made  it 
necessary  to  economize  space  as  much  as  possible,  and  the  advan- 
tages of  dried  vegetables  for  this  purpose  are  obvious.  The  in- 


FOOD  FOR  ARMIES  431 

definite  keeping  qualities  are  also  of  great  advantage  for  army 
uses.  A  bit  of  rust  may  eat  a  hole  in  a  tin  can  of  food,  and  spoil 
it  utterly  within  a  few  hours  by  fermentation  and  decay,  but 
dried  vegetables  can  be  kept  in  barrels  with  much  less  danger  of 
loss,  and  the  keeping  qualities  are  remarkable.  It  is  reported 
that  some  barrels  of  mixed  dried  vegetables  prepared  for  the 
British  army  in  the  South  African  War  (1899-1902)  have  re- 
cently been  opened  and  used,  being  as  good  as  when  first  pre- 
pared. 

If  canned  fruits  and  vegetables  have  given  us  access  to  the 
ends  of  the  earth,  dried  vegetables  make  that  access  readier, 
because  cheaper.  Vegetables  for  the  British  army  in  France 
were  dried  by  the  million  pounds  in  British  Columbia.  One 
plant  at  Chilliwack  turned  out  hundreds  of  thousands  of  sealed 
tin  cans  each  containing  a  standard  mixture  of  15  pounds  com- 
prising : 

3  pounds  Carrots 

2V-J  "        Turnips 

21/2  "       Potatoes 

1  "       Onions 

3  "       Peas 

3  "       Beans 

15  pounds 

Each  vegetable  is  evaporated  separately,  because  of  different 
heat  requirements.  This  mixture  stewed  with  some  meat,  handed 
out  in  a  tin  cup  with  a  spoon  and  a  chunk  of  bread,  contains 
everything  that  is  necessary  to  keep  a  man  in  fine  physical  trim. 
The  scurvy  of  the  ancient  army  is  no  more.  The  appearance  of 
the  American  soldier  in  1918  vindicates  his  food. 

It  is  almost  impossible  for  us  to  appreciate  the  full  value  of 
this  source  of  food — cheap,  durable,  wholesome,  and  easily  pre- 
pared— a  means  of  support  to  tens  and  hundreds  of  millions  of 
people  in  the  towns,  cities,  and  even  on  the  farms  of  the  Western 
World.  It  is  another  great  vindication  of  the  factory  as  a  sub- 
stitute for  the  kitchen.  The  low  cost  and  unlimited  supply  make 
the  dehydrated  vegetables,  perhaps,  the  peer  of  the  locomotive 
as  a  factor  enabling  the  earth  to  support  vast  numbers  of  men. 

It  meets  the  last  whim  of  fashion  to  pay  $8  a  crate  for  fresh 
string-beans  from  the  tip  of  Florida,  or  the  island  of  Madeira 


432          DRYING  OF  FRUITS  AND  VEGETABLES 

in  midwinter,  but  a  paper  package  of  nicely  dried  beans  contains 
the  same  elements  of  nutrition  at  a  fraction  of  the  cost.  A  ton 
of  cabbage  in  the  dehydrating  plant  in  the  fall  costs  no  more 
than  a  case  of  canned  goods  in  the  spring. 

If  the  cost  of  animal  production  should  cut  down  the  milk 
supply,  these  dried  vegetables  will  become  even  more  important, 
because  they  seem  to  have  the  necessary  ''fat  soluble  A"  and 
"water  soluble  B"  in  great  quantities,  and  if  dairy  products  are 
cut  out  of  our  diet,  at  least  thirty  per  cent,  of  our  food,  dry 
weight,  should  according  to  McCollum  be  greens,  and,  according 
to  present  belief,  they  are  as  good  for  us  dry  as  fresh  products. 


CHAPTER  XXI 
CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

THE   COMMERCIAL  ADVANTAGES   OF   CITROUS  FRUITS 

THE  citrous  fruits,  including  the  orange,  the  lemon,  the  lime,  the 
grape-fruit  or  pomelo,  and  several  others  of  small  commercial  im- 
portance, are  the  advance  guard  of  the  tropic  fruit  supply.  We 
prize  them  for  their  acid  flavor,  which  is  sometimes  so  strong  as 
to  require  sugar,  as  with  the  lemons  and  limes.  Sometimes,  as 
in  oranges,  there  is  enough  sugar  along  with  the  acid  to  make 
them  palatable  in  the  'natural  form.  These  fruits  are  not  im- 
portant in  the  actual  amount  of  nourishment  they  bring  us. 
They  belong  rather  in  the  class  of  regulators.  They  are  good, 
refreshing,  stimulating  tonics,  and  distinct  aids  to  health  as  well 
as  to  the  pleasures  of  the  table.  In  actual  importance  the  orange 
perhaps  renders  its  greatest  service  as  food  for  babies,  supple- 
menting pasteurized  or  boiled  milk,  which  loses  some  of  its  vita- 
mines  in  heating. 

People  of  the  north  temperate  zone  can  have  the  benefit  of 
these  fruits  because  of  the  tough,  thick,  oily,  and  bitter  skin 
which  serves  as  an  effective  protection  against  insects,  bruises, 
and  decay.  A  host  of  other  delicious  tropic  fruits  remain  prac- 
tically unknown  to  commerce  because  they  lack  such  natural  pro- 
tection, so  that  they  could  not  enter  commerce  until  recently  and 
now  only  with  difficulty.  From  1800  to  1850  an  orangery,  an 
artificially  warmed  building  for  orange  growing,  was  a  part  of 
the  equipment  of  the  luxurious  rich  men  of  Europe  and  America. 
At  that  time  oranges  entered  commerce  only  occasionally  and 
always  at  great  risk  of  spoiling  on  the  slow  and  uncertain  sailing 
vessel.  A  steamship  now  can  carry  oranges  easily  from  Japan 
to  the  United  States,  from  the  West  Indies  to  Europe,  and  the 
orangery  has  almost  ceased  to  exist.  The  fruit  is  to  be  had  at 
almost  all  seasons  of  the  year,  since  an  orange  tree  carries  ripe 
fruit  and  green  fruit  while  it  is  in  blossom. 

433 


434  CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

THE  ORANGE 

The  orange  is  a  native  of  southern  Asia,  possibly  China,  where, 
as  in  India,  it  has  been  used  for  many  centuries.  It  was  brought 
by  the  Portuguese  to  Europe  in  1458,  and  became  an  important 
industry  there,  as  it  now  is  in  the  United  States.  The  orange 
now  grows  wild  throughout  the  tropics  and  the  edges  of  both 
temperate  zones,  and  is  everywhere  much  prized  by  the  inhabi- 
tants. It  was  even  growing  wild  in  Florida  a  hundred  years 
ago,  having  escaped  from  the  plantings  of  the  early  Spanish 
settlers.  Like  many  other  fruit  trees,  it  produces  fruit  of  finest 
flavor  near  the  colder  limit  of  its  production,  so  that  the  fruit 
of  the  United  States  is  superior  to  that  of  the  West  Indies.  This 
fact,  in  combination  with  the  desire  to  produce  as  many  of  our 
things  as  possible  at  home,  has  caused  the  orange  industry  in 
both  Europe  and  the  United  States  to  push  itself  northward 
into  climates  where  there  is  constant  danger  and  occasional  great 
loss  from  freezing. 

Its  wide  distribution  makes  possible  an  almost  unlimited  pro- 
duction, but  inasmuch  as  the  fruit  is  quite  bulky  and  its  com- 
mercial handling  expensive,  it,  like  the  banana,  can  only  enter 
commerce  in  large  quantities  where  transportation  facilities  are 
of  the  best.  Consequently,  while  it  is  important  in  commerce, 
the  world's  great  supply  comes  from  a  few  localities  readily 
accessible  to  the  world's  great  markets.  It  is  quite  certain  that 
more  oranges  waste  beneath  the  tropic  orange  trees  than  are 
eaten  by  the  people  of  the  north  temperate  zone.  This  wasting 
frequently  occurs  even  in  such  nearby  places  as  Jamaica  and 
the  other  West  Indian  Islands,  whence  "it  appears  almost  im- 
possible to  get  a  profitable  outlet  for  oranges  except  in  the  very 
early  weeks  of  the  season. ' '  *  Jamaican  oranges  could,  however, 
come  to  the  United  States  but  for  the  American  tariff.  In 
Paraguay,  a  country  far  up  the  Parana  River,  north  of  Argen- 
tina, oranges  are  regularly  used  for  fattening  hogs,  and  are  fed 
to  the  donkey  and  any  other  animal  that  will  eat  them;  it  is 
only  from  the  districts  adjacent  to  steamboat  landings  on  the 
banks  of  the  great  river  that  they  are  sent  by  boat  to  Argentina 
and  Uruguay.  Paraguay  is  for  these  countries  a  sub-tropic 

•United  States  Commerce  Report,  October  7,  1910. 


435 

garden  spot  whence  they  receive,  as  does  New  England  from 
Florida,  and  Britain  from  Spain,  the  fruits  and  vegetables  of  a 
warmer  clime. 

IMPORTANCE   IN   THE   MEDITERRANEAN   COUNTRIES   OF  ORANGE 

GROWING 

It  is  in  the  Mediterranean  countries  that  commerce  in  the 
citrous  fruits  was  long  most  important.  The  combined  warming 
influences  of  the  Mediterranean  Sea,  the  Sahara  Desert,  and  the 
Atlantic  Ocean  make  these  Mediterranean  countries  the  most 
northern  of  all  regions  for  these  fruits.  A  short  distance  away 
are  the  millions  of  people  of  northern  and  western  Europe,  con- 
nected with  the  orange  lands  of  the  South  by  steamer  and 
numerous  railroads. 

The  orange  is  found  on  the  western  coast  of  Portugal  as  far 
north  as  40°.  Orange  districts  skirt  the  southern  and  eastern 
coasts  of  the  Iberian  Peninsula,  but  the  interior,  except  the  plain 
of  Andalusia,  is  too  high  and  cold  for  this  fruit. 

The  most  important  Spanish  orange-growing  districts  are 
Malaga  and  the  shores  of  the  Gulf  of  Valencia,  near  the  central 
part  of  the  eastern  coast.  The  steamship  lines  that  skirt  this 
coast  carry  thence  to  Great  Britain  half  the  orange  supply  used 
in  that  country.  Much  British  marmalade  is  made  of  Spanish 
oranges  and  the  people  of  Holland  manufacture  a  drink  called 
curacao  from  the  skin  of  the  bitter  orange,  which  is  grown  for 
this  purpose  in  Spain.  So  important  is  the  bitter  orange  mar- 
malade with  which  the  British  make  bread  and  butter  palatable 
that  even  during  the  shipping  stress  of  1917  the  British  Govern- 
ment provided  steamers  and  on  its  own  account  imported  thou- 
sands of  tons  of  bitter  oranges  from  this  coast.  As  an  example 
of  the  limited  area  necessary  to  produce  important  staples,  it 
may  be  stated  that  about  six  thousand  acres  of  bitter  oranges 
in  Spain  supply  the  world  market  and  at  times  oversupply  it  so 
that  the  fruit  is  thrown  away. 

THE   IMPORTANCE   OF  ISLANDS  IN  EUROPEAN  FRUIT  GROWING 

It  is  upon  islands  that  the  growing  of  citrous  fruits  has 
reached  its  most  extensive  development  in  Europe,  chiefly  be- 


436  CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

cause  the  surrounding  waters  afford  protection  from  frost.  The 
Azores  have  long  been  important  shippers  of  oranges.  Orange 
growing  is  important  on  the  rainy  side  of  the  Balearic  Islands. 
Malta  has  long  been  famous  for  the  excellence  of  its  oranges; 
in  Sicily  and  the  neighboring  shores  of  Calabria  is  the  greatest 
development  of  the  Italian  orange  and  lemon  industry.  This  in- 
dustry is  quite  as  important  to  Italy  as  to  Spain,  Italy  pos- 
sessing an  orange  or  lemon  tree  for  every  two  persons  in  the 
whole  country.  Although  the  orange  reaches  its  highest  north- 
ern latitude  in  44°,  on  the  protected  coast  of  Italy  not  far  from 
Genoa,  it  is  not  important  north  of  Rome,  and  the  lemon,  being 
more  susceptible  to  cold,  will  not  grow  north  of  Rome  at  all. 
Sicily  predominates  over  the  mainland  in  the  production  of  both 
these  fruits,  having  almost  a  monopoly  of  the  production  of 
lemons.  From  this  island  they  have  for  a  century  been  distrib- 
uted to  Europe  and  America.  The  Italian  and  Sicilian  peasants 
give  these  fruits  the  greatest  care.  South  of  Naples  they  can 
only  be  grown  in  the  few  spots  that  can  be  irrigated,  for  both 
of  these  trees  are  greedy  for  water.  In  Sicily  a  patch  of  ir- 
rigable land  the  size  of  a  football  field,  with  an  orange  climate, 
is  regarded  as  a  fortune.  The  ground  is  usually  cultivated  with 
the  hoe  and  the  spade.  Garden  crops  are  often  grown  between 
the  trees. 

AFRICA   AND  ASIA 

France  receives  a  large  part  of  her  orange  supply  from  the 
African  colony  of  Algiers,  the  chief  center  of  production  being 
near  the  port  of  Oran.  The  orange  grows  beneath  the  date  trees 
in  the  oases,  along  the  edge  of  the  desert  from  Morocco  to  the 
Euphrates.  With  the  exception  of  the  Barbary  States,  Africa 
is  beyond  the  limits  of  orange  transportation  under  present  con- 
ditions of  production,  although  there  are  large  areas  where  it 
grows.  A  few  Asiatic  oranges  go  to  England  in  times  of  peace, 
from  Jaffa  on  the  Syrian  coast ;  and  from  southern  Japan  a  few 
come  to  the  United  States.  Otherwise  Asia,  the  native  home  of 
the  orange,  has  almost  no  foreign  commerce  in  this  fruit, 
although  it  grows  from  the  Mediterranean  to  the  China  seas. 

The  United  States  began  to  import  oranges  from  Italy  and 


AMERICAN  ORANGE  INDUSTRY  437 

Sicily  (where  the  industry  has  long  been  established)  about 
1835,  when  the  American  sailing  vessels  were  perfected  to  great 
speed.  With  the  development  of  the  steamship  this  import  be- 
came large  and  regular,  and  the  West  Indies  also  sent  a  supply, 
the  chief  sources  being  the  nearby  Bahama  Islands  and  the 
British  colony  of  Jamaica.  Recently  home  production  has  almost 
ended  the  import  into  the  United  States,  and  we  may  at  no 
distant  date  compete  in  foreign  markets  with  the  centuries-old 
orange  centers  along  the  Mediterranean,  for  we  have  two  orange 
districts,  one  in  Florida  and  the  other  in  California,  in  each  of 
which  the  area  suitable  for  orange  growing  is  much  more  than 
enough  to  supply  our  own  needs. 

THE  INFLUENCE  OF  RAILROADS  AND  COLD  WAVES  IN  AMERICAN 
ORANGE  GROWING 

In  the  great  wave  of  development  that  followed  the  Civil  War, 
orange  planting  on  a  commercial  scale  was  begun  in  Florida  and 
met  with  great  success.  Prices  were  high  and  profits  were  large. 
The  indefinite  amount  of  cheap  land  in  Florida,  added  to  this 
initial  success,  furnished  the  conditions  for  an  agricultural  boom, 
which  received  the  further  stimulus  of  the  lure  of  distance  and 
the  charm  of  the  palm — two  considerations  hard  for  the  North- 
erner to  resist.  The  completion  of  lines  of  railroad  from  the 
North  to  Florida,  offering  an  express  train  service,  was  also  an 
important  factor  in  this  orange  boom. 

The  winters  for  several  years  prior  to  1880  were  almost  frost- 
less,  and  the  rains  abundant  all  the  year  round,  so  that  the 
growth  of  well-cultivated  young  groves  was  phenomenal,  and  the 
northern  half  of  peninsular  Florida  gave  itself  up  to  orange 
culture  with  reckless  enthusiasm.  It  was  estimated  that  the 
orange  at  twelve  years  of  age  would  pay  from  ten  to  one 
hundred  and  fifty  per  cent,  interest  on  a  valuation  of  $100  for 
each  tree,  and  in  the  case  of  individual  trees  even  the  highest 
figure  was  sometimes  realized. 

The  first  check  came  in  1886,  when  a  three-days'  blizzard  from 
the  northwest  swept  over  the  state  and  injured  or  at  least  de- 
foliated all  the  orange  trees  down  to  the  twenty-ninth  degree, 
and  still  further  south  in  all  but  the  most  protected  localities. 


438  CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

This  injury,  however,  was  only  temporary  in  most  cases,  and 
while  much  of  the  crop  of  1885-86  was  lost,  there  was  no  diminu- 
tion in  the  crop  of  the  following  year,  although  the  trees  them- 
selves had  received  an  evident  check  in  growth. 

In  December,  1894,  a  still  more  severe  northwest  blizzard  de- 
foliated all  the  trees  as  far  south  as  the  Manatee  River,  and 
this  blizzard  was  followed  in  February  by  another  similar  storm, 
which  caught  the  trees  covered  with  tender  shoots  and  young 
foliage,  with  active  sap,  and  killed  most  of  them  to  the  ground 
from  Tampa  north,  and,  moreover,  so  enfeebled  them  from 
repeated  shocks  that  the  majority  were  unable  to  rally.  The 
loss  to  the  Florida  orange  industry  by  this  double  disaster  is 
reasonably  estimated  at  $100,000,000. 

The  crop  of  1894-95,  the  largest  produced  up  to  that  time,  was 
estimated  at  six  million  boxes,  each  measuring  two  cubic  feet. 
The  following  year  about  seventy -five  thousand  boxes  were  pro- 
duced, all  from  south  of  the  latitude  of  Tampa,  and  it  was  only 
in  1900-01  that  the  crop  again  reached  one  million  boxes,  ninety- 
five  per  cent,  from  regions  south  of  Orange  County,  a  proportion 
the  reverse  of  that  observed  "before  the  freeze." 

Stimulated  by  the  early  success  of  Florida,  the  commercial 
orange  industry  promptly  spread  to  other  Gulf  States.  The 
product  of  this  Southern  region  is  excellent  if  it  ripens ;  but  the 
occasional  cold  waves  coming  from  the  center  of  the  continent 
and  bringing  freezing  temperatures  to  the  Gulf  shore  and  to 
nearly  all  of  Florida,  have  been  disastrous  to  the  orange  orchards 
of  the  whole  Gulf  region,  excepting  a  part  of  Florida.  If  not 
in  rapid  growth  at  the  time,  the  orange  tree  can  resist  some 
frost,  but  in  the  occasional  heat  and  moisture  of  the  Gulf  climate 
the  tree  may  grow  rapidly  at  any  time  during  the  winter.  For- 
tunately the  industry  in  most  of  the  other  Gulf  orange  districts 
had  not  progressed  so  far  as  in  Florida,  when  the  one  devastating 
winter  of  1894-95  altered  the  prospects  of  the  state  by  killing  prac- 
tically all  the  orange  trees  in  the  northern  part  of  the  peninsula 
and  bankrupting  many  of  the  growers.  Many  Florida  groves 
were  renewed;  and,  despite  occasional  injury  to  the  crop  and 
sometimes  to  the  trees,  there  has  been  no  other  such  destruction 
as  that  of  1894.  Many  growers  now  protect  their  orchards  with 
artificial  heat. 


FLORIDA  AND  CALIFORNIA  439 

Florida  again  became  and  still  is  a  heavy  shipper  of  oranges ; 
and  by  1911  the  competition  between  our  two  orange-growing 
regions  had  become  keen.  The  early  development  in  California 
was  much  like  that  in  Florida.  A  small  garden  industry  received 
access  to  the  markets  of  the  country  through  the  development  of 
through  railroad  service,  and  large  plantings  were  then  made. 

The  orange  groves  of  California  and  Arizona  are  subjected  to 
greater  winter  cold  than  those  of  Florida,  but  suffer  compara- 
tively little  damage  from  it,  since  the  winters  are  more  uni- 
formly cool  and  dry  and  the  trees  are  consequently  dormant, 
while  the  occasional  warmth  of  a  Florida  winter  keeps  vegetation 
more  or  less  constantly  in  active  growth,  and  hence  more  sensi- 
tive to  sudden  frosts.  In  Florida  in  1894  not  only  orange  trees, 
but  peach  and  mulberry  trees  and  old  wistaria  vines — all  hardy 
as  far  north  as  Canada  when  dormant — were  frozen  to  the 
ground.  Naturally  the  desolation  of  Florida  in  1895,  after  the 
American  people  had  become  accustomed  to  eating  oranges,  gave 
a  great  advantage  to  California,  where  the  industry  grew  rap- 
idly. Then,  seventeen  years  later,  as  if  to  humble  her  and  check 
her  confidence  in  a  good  climate,  there  came,  in  January,  1913, 
an  astonishing  cold  wave  over  the  whole  of  the  California  citrous 
fruit-belt.  This  region  is  in  a  climate  where  the  great  cyclonic 
storms  that  bring  the  rains  to  the  United  States,  also  to  Europe, 
always  have  their  centers  to  the  north,  so  that  the  wind  always 
blows  over  California  from  the  sea.  Hence  her  constant  west 
winds  and  her  constant  mild  climate.  As  Florida  gets  winds 
from  all  directions  the  northern  limit  of  the  orange  in  that  state 
is  about  30°  north  latitude,  while  in  California  it  is  nearly  five 
hundred  miles  farther  north.  The  oceanic  climate  of  the  Pacific 
Coast  enables  the  tree  to  grow  as  far  north  as  37  °,  north  of  San 
Francisco.  On  this  one  January  morning  in  1913,  the  weather 
conditions  were  reversed  for  the  first  time  in  forty  years,  and  a 
cold  wind  blew  down  out  of  Nevada.  The  loss  of  fruit,  estimated 
at  from  $20,000,000  to  $40,000,000,  restored  for  a  time  the 
equilibrium  of  the  competition  between  the  two  regions.  The 
danger  of  a  destructive  cold  wave  in  California  is,  however,  much 
less  than  in  Florida,  although  frosts  that  destroy  the  crop  are 
not  uncommon  in  many  localities.  The  best  groves  are  in  the 
thermal-belt  along  the  slopes,  as  are  the  peach  orchards  of  West 


440 


CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 


Virginia.  The  high  price  of  oranges  after  the  destruction  of  the 
Florida  crop  in  1894  led  to  large  plantings  in  California,  where 
the  orange  is  grown  with  the  greatest  care  on  irrigated  land  of 
high  value,  the  orchards  often  being  valued  at  $1,000  or  more  per 
acre.  This  very  high  value  is  due  not  to  scarcity  of  land  but  to 
scarcity  of  water,  which  amounts  to  scarcity  of  orange  land, 


FIG.  120. — Irrigation  of  Arizona  citrous  fruit  tree  by  the  basin  method, 
economical  of  water.      (United  States  Reclamation  Service.) 

since  unirrigated  lands  cannot  grow  oranges.  Great  pains  arc 
taken  to  get  and  save  water  for  the  irrigation  of  the  Cali- 
fornia fruit  orchards.  Tunnels  are  sometimes  built  into  the 
hillsides  to  strike  the  underground  flow,  wells  are  dug,  and 
pumps  are  used  to  lift  the  water  to  the  land,  where  it  is  some-- 
times carried  in  pipes  to  the  base  of  each  tree,  so  that  the 
smallest  possible  amount  may  make  an  acre  prosperous.  The 
great  distance  from  the  Eastern  markets  has  made  transportation 


CO-OPERATIVE  FRUIT  SHIPPING  441 

costs  high,  so  that  only  the  best  fruit  can  be  shipped.  To  meet 
these  conditions  the  fruit  growers  have  formed  associations  which 
are  good  examples  of  co-operative  enterprise.  The  grower  sur- 
renders his  fruit  at  the  shed  of  the  co-operative  packing  house, 
where  the  oranges  are  graded,  packed,  labeled,  sold,  and  of  late 
even  advertised.  Thousands  of  growers  combine  to  pay  the  cost 
of  advertising  campaigns  on  the  trolley  cars  and  many  other 
places  in  centers  of  consumption  thousands  of  miles  away. 
Deliberate  experiment  has  shown  that  a  given  amount  of  adver- 
tising will  increase  sales  by  satisfactory  amounts.  This  adver- 
tising has  been  necessary  in  order  to  create  an  outlet  for  a 
product  which  has  increased  from  an  average  of  26,000  cars  a 
year  in  1904-OG,  to  42,000  cars  in  1915-17.  The  state  of  Cali- 
fornia has  increased  its  shipments  of  lemons  and  oranges  to- 
gether from  22,000  cars  in  1900-02  to  50,000  cars  in  1915-17. 

In  the  southern  part  of  the  California  citrous  district  the 
lemon  is  now  being  extensively  grown  for  the  American  market, 
but  the  continued  import,  almost  entirely  from  Sicily,  shows  that 
the  home  supply  is  well  under  the  demand. 

THE  FUTURE  SUPPLY   OF  ORANGES 

The  development  of  the  two  American  orange-belts  cut  down 
imports  to  the  United  States  fifty  per  cent,  between  1904  and 
1908,  and  those  of  1910  were  less  than  a  third  as  great  as  those 
of  1908.  The  small  quantities  still  imported  come  from  Jamaica, 
Cuba,  Honduras,  Mexico,  Spain,  Italy,  and  Japan.  The  steam- 
ship lines  from  Italy  that  once  carried  hundreds  of  thousands  of 
boxes  of  oranges  and  lemons  now  come  with  a  scanty  cargo  of 
lemons.  It  is  likely  that  in  a  short  time  the  United  States  will 
become  an  orange  exporter  and  develop  strong  competition  be- 
tween Florida  and  California.  Florida  is  more  subject  to  frosts 
and,  because  of  her  moist  climate,  to  fungous  diseases  which  at 
times  injure  the  trees,  but  she  is  nearer  to  the  market  in  the 
great  centers  of  population  of  the  East  and  makes  the  claim  that 
her  oranges  are  juicier  and  that  her  grape-fruits  are  better  than 
those  of  California.  The  professor  of  horticulture  in  the  Uni- 
versity of  California  declares  that  California  is  using  for  oranges 
only  one-tenth  of  her  suitable  land.  The  orange  land  of  Florida, 


442  CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

with  but  twelve  per  cent,  of  her  area  in  cultivation,  with  only 
fourteen  persons  to  the  square  mile,  an  abundant  rainfall,  and 
about  half  of  her  area  in  reclaimable  swamp  of  great  fertility, 
has  a  much  greater  possibility  of  expansion  than  has  the  orange 
land  of  California.  The  comparison  of  Florida  with  Sicily  is 
even  more  striking.  Florida  is  nearly  all  level  and  capable  of 
tillage,  Sicily  very  hilly  and  rocky;  Florida  is  well  watered, 
Sicily  is  dependent  on  irrigation  for  all  important  crops  but 
wheat;  Sicily  possesses  twenty-five  times  Florida's  population 
per  square  mile. 

Manifestly  the  limit  of  orange  production  in  the  United  States 
is  to  be  set,  not  by  resources,  but  by  prices.  Unchecked  produc- 
tion in  Florida  and  California  can  easily  result  in  the  same  low 
price  that  prevails  in  the  tropics,  where  oranges  lie  unused  on 
the  ground.  The  citrous  fruit  market  is  easy  to  glut,  as  is  shown 
by  the  shipment  of  eight  hundred  thousand  boxes  from  Sicily 
to  the  United  States  in  three  months  in  1895,  when  the  price 
went  down  to  such  a  low  figure  that  only  shipping  costs  and  duty 
were  paid — a  condition  that  at  times  faces  the  Cuban  orange 
shippers. 

In  1910  the  United  States  had  two  and  one-half  times  as  many 
oranges  as  in  1900.     We  should  note  that  this  increase  occurred 
during  a  decade  when  the  number  of  meat  animals  declined  and 
the  price  of  grain  rose. 
« 

CUBAN   ORANGES 

The  fear  of  destruction  of  the  orange  crop  by  frost  in  Florida 
caused  a  boom  in  orange  planting  in  Cuba  in  the  few  years 
immediately  after  1899.  Orange  and  grape-fruit  groves  were 
planted,  chiefly  by  Americans,  at  an  expense  of  $10,000,000 ;  but 
the  Cuban  grape-fruit  is  said  to  be  sweet  and  therefore  not  so 
desirable  as  that  of  Florida,  while  the  tariff  and  shipping  costs 
leave  so  little  money  for  the  Cuban  growers  that  there  seems 
to  be  small  prospect  of  large  orange  shipments  from  that  island 
to  the  United  States,  or  to  Europe  with  its  Mediterranean 
supply.  The  Cuban  orange,  seems,  like  the  Jamaican  orange, 
destined  to  lie  upon  the  ground  rather  than  to  enter  foreign 
trade,  unless  calamities  overtake  Florida  and  California,  or  the 
manufacture  of  orange  products  is  greatly  increased. 


THE  CITRIC  EXTREMES  443 

THE   GRAPE-FRUIT   AND   THE   LIME 

The  speedy  capture  of  the  American  market  by  the  grape- 
fruit is  one  of  the  most  spectacular  and  encouraging  changes  in 
food  supply  that  has  happened  in  the  last  twenty  years.  It 
shows  that  we  can  change  our  habits.  This  big  brother  of  the 
orange,  with  its  pungent,  slightly  bitter  flavor,  first  came  from 
Florida.  It  is  probably  true  that  Florida  produces  more  accept- 
able grape-fruit  than  either  of  its  rivals,  California  and  Cuba. 

The  lime,  excepting  the  new  kumquat,  the  smallest  of  the  com- 
mercial members  of  the  citrous  family,  seems  to  thrive  best  in 
the  tropics,  the  chief  supply  coming  from  the  Lesser  Antilles. 
The  leading  producer  is  the  little  island  of  Dominica,  whose 
people,  since  the  decline  of  the  sugar  industry,  have  given  much 
attention  to  the  production  of  the  lime,  which  is  well  suited  to 
the  steep,  rocky  limestone  hills  of  the  island.  Here  are  planta- 
tions and  factories  owned  by  the  great  candy  manufacturers  of 
Europe,  who  prepare  lime  juice  for  the  preparation  of  candies, 
and  sell  citrate  of  lime  and  lime  oil  for  use  in  the  preparation 
of  drinks,  medicines,  and  some  commercial  products.  The  neigh- 
boring island  of  Montserrat  also  produces  limes. 

We  are  greatly  in  need  of  some  process  whereby  orange  juice 
concentrated,  canned,  or  dried,  can  be  made  where  oranges  now 
rot,  and  cheaply  brought  like  powdered  milk  or  dried  vegetables 
to  remote  places.  It  is  reasonable  to  expect  that  the  food  scien- 
tists will  give  us  such  a  commodity  ere  long,  and  thus  place  the 
orange  in  the  most  remote  mountain  cabins.  The  orange  growers 
of  Natal,  British  South  Africa,  were  having  conferences  in  1917 
over  the  possibilities  of  getting  some  manufacturing  outlet  for 
their  oranges,  and  were  considering  the  manufacture  of  jam  and 
of  citric  acid. 

THE  GRAPE   HISTORY   AND   THE   REQUIREMENTS  OF  THE   VINE 

The  great  antiquity  of  the  grape  is  indicated  by  the  unfor- 
tunate relaxation  of  Noah  after  the  strain  of  operating  the  ark. 
When  Micah  wished  to  draw  a  picture  of  earthly  bliss  he  placed 
a  man  beneath  his  own  vine  and  fig  tree,  and  abolished  war  so 
that  there  should  be  none  to  make  him  afraid.  The  grape,  prob- 


444  CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

ably  the  oldest  of  the  domesticated  fruits,  is  considered  a  luxury 
wherever  it  can  be  obtained,  being  a  delicious  food  as  well  as 
material  for  the  too  highly  prized  wine.  These  two  uses  have 
combined  with  its  laudation  by  classic  writers  to  make  the  grape 
the  most  celebrated  of  fruits.  Its  patron,  Bacchus,  was  a  god. 

The  vine  is  indigenous  in  the  United  States,  from  the  Atlantic  to 
the  Pacific,  from  British  Columbia  to  the  tropics,  and  in  Eurasia 
from  Hungary  to  Afghanistan.  Grape  seeds  are  to  be  found  in 
the  remains  of  the  Swiss  lake  dwellings  dating  back  to  the  bronze 
age,  but  it  is  probable  that  the  Old  World  industry  as  we  now 
know  it  began  somewhere  in  western  Asia.  The  many  Old  Testa- 
ment references  to  the  vineyard  show  its  great  importance  among 
the  Hebrews.  The  grape  was  early  introduced  among  the  Greeks 
and  Romans  and  has  spread  throughout  the  world  wherever  the 
climate  and  soil  permit  its  cultivation  and  even  beyond  the 
natural  climatic  bounds;  for  large  quantities  of  most  delicious 
and  extensive  grapes  are  grown  in  the  hothouses  of  England, 
Holland,  and  France. 

The  chief  requisite  for  the  grape  is  a  rather  hot  summer  last- 
ing into  September.  The  vine  sends  its  roots  to  great  depth  and 
can  thus  search  out  water  in  arid  soil  and  will  thrive  in  dry 
climates  when  surrounding  vegetation  is  brown  and  dead.  For 
this  reason  it  grows  in  southern  Italy  and  other  Mediterranean 
lands  without  irrigation  on  the  hills  above  the  orange  groves. 
In  California,  where  irrigation  must  be  used  for  many  other 
fruits  and  crops,  the  grape  crop  is  often  grown  without  any 
artificial  watering,  even  in  some  localities  where  there  is  no  rain 
from  blossoming  time  until  harvest  time.  Accordingly,  the  grape 
is  at  home  upon  the  edge  of  the  world 's  sub-tropic  belt  in  each  of 
the  three  continents  of  the  Northern  and  Southern  Hemispheres. 
Too  much  moisture  favors  the  growth  of  fungi  which  attack  and 
destroy  both  the  leaves  and  the  fruit.  On  this  account  in  the 
monsoon  climate  of  India,  China,  and  Japan,  with  its  heavy 
summer  rainfall,  extensive  grape  growing  is  impossible.  Even 
under  the  best  of  conditions,  fungi  sometimes  appear  and  work 
great  damage,  for  instance  the  fungus  called  the  "oidium," 
which  has  practically  destroyed  the  vineyards  of  the  Madeira 
Islands  and  has  wrought  great  havoc  in  other  parts  of  the 
world. 


THE  BELOVED  VINE  445 

THE  LIMITS   OF  GRAPE  GROWING 

Although  the  grape  is  grown  on  the  sheltered  Channel  Islands, 
the  line  marking  the  limit  of  the  industry  on  the  European  main- 
land is  curved  from  the  west  coast  of  France  near  the  mouth  of 
the  River  Loire  northward  to  latitude  53°  in  eastern  Germany. 
This  northward  trend  is  due  to  the  increasing  heat  of  the  summer 
as  we  go  eastward  from  the  moderating  influence  of  the  ocean 
into  the  greater  heat  of  the  continental  summer.  In  Russia, 
where  the  summers,  though  hot,  are  shorter,  the  line  of  grape 
cultivation  descends  to  the  Sea  of  Azof  and  thence  runs  eastward 
through  southern  Russia  and  Asia.  In  America,  there  is  a  simi- 
lar bend  of  the  boundary  from  37°  north  in  California  to  40° 
in  southern  Ontario,  where  the  lake-belt  extends  the  region  of 
cultivation  northward.  In  the  Southern  Hemisphere  grapes 
grow  near  the  chief  centers  of  population  in  Australia,  South 
Africa,  and  temperate  South  America. 

THE  GRAPE  INDUSTRY 

In  past  centuries,  including  the  nineteenth,  grapes  were  chiefly 
important  for  the  manufacture  of  wine.  A  change  is  now  in 
progress,  partly  due  to  the  growing  opposition  to  alcoholic 
drinks,  and  partly  to  the  increasing  use  of  grapes  as  food, 
resulting  from  the  greater  facility  of  transportation.  Grape 
growing  and  wine  making  are  most  important  as  national  indus- 
tries in  France,  Italy,  and  Spain — countries  which  produce  five- 
sixths  of  the  world's  wine.  Other  countries  prominent  in  the 
industry  are  Austria,  Russia,  Switzerland,  and  the  United  States. 
Italy  depends  more  upon  grapes  and  wine  growing  than  does  any 
other  nation.  The  limestone  hills  and  dry  summer  permit  the 
grape  to  thrive  better  than  most  other  crops ;  consequently  it  is 
grown  in  all  parts  of  the  country.  Vineyards  cover  not  less  than 
fifteen  thousand  square  miles  or  about  one-seventh  of  the  area  of 
the  kingdom,  one-sixth  of  all  used  ground,  and  one-half  as  much 
land  as  all  the  grain  crops  combined.  These  figures  become  more 
significant  in  comparison  with  those  of  the  corn  crop  of  the 
United  States,  which  covers  about  one-seventeenth  of  the  area 
of  the  country.  The  Italian  vineyard  is  usually  cultivated  with 


446  CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

the  hoe  and  the  spade,  garden  crops  are  sometimes  grown  be- 
tween the  rows,  and  much  of  the  soil  is  so  steep  that  it  is  kept 
from  washing  into  the  Mediterranean  only  by  the  laborious  build- 
ing of  terraces,  sometimes  held  up  by  stone  walls.  It  is  chiefly 
this  intensive  agricultural  industry  that  has  given  to  rugged  and 
arid  Sicily  a  population  of  three  hundred  persons  to  the  square 
mile. 

France  is  the  leader  of  wine-producing  countries.  While  the 
grape  area  is  only  one-half  that  of  Italy,  the  yield  is  greater  than 
Italy's,  on  account  of  the  superiority  of  French  land,  rainfall, 
and  agricultural  methods.  The  French  grape  crop  covers  only 
one-eighth  as  much  land  as  that  given  to  the  grains.  Although 
it  does  not  extend  into  the  northwestern  part  of  the  country,  the 
famous  province  of  Champagne  touches  the  Belgian  boundary. 
The  high  reputation  of  French  wines,  among  them  claret,  bur- 
gundy, and  champagne,  makes  wine,  after  textiles,  the  chief 
export  of  the  country.  Her  foreign  commerce  and  prosperity 
depend  to  so  great  an  extent  on  this  trade  that  a  calamity  to 
grape  growing  is  a  national  calamity.  Such  was  the  phylloxera ; 
an  insect  pest  which  came  from  America  to  Europe,  where  it 
spread  through  all  the  wine-growing  countries,  thence  to  Algeria, 
and  finally  reached  South  Africa,  Australia,  and  South  America. 
The  phylloxera,  a  tiny  insect  of  the  aphis  family,  fastens  on  the 
roots  of  the  grapevine  and  sucks  the  juices  from  them  until  the 
vine  is  killed.  No  cure  has  been  found.  France,  which  had 
nearly  six  million  acres  of  vineyards  in  1875,  had  less  than  two 
million  acres  of  healthy  vine,  in  1885,  and  another  million  acres 
were  invaded  by  the  phylloxera.  The  only  circumstance  which 
prevented  the  practical  extermination  of  the  European  varieties 
of  grape  was  the  fact  that  in  the  eastern  United  States,  the  home 
of  the  phylloxera,  there  were  varieties  of  grape  immune  to  its 
attacks.  These  were  imported  into  Europe  and  set  out  by  mil- 
lions in  the  vineyards  which  the  phylloxera  had  devastated;  tops 
of  the  European  varieties  were  grafted  upon  their  roots,  making 
a  composite  plant  with  American  roots  to  resist  the  destroying 
insect  and  a  European  top  to  produce  the  desired  wine  grape. 
Thus,  the  industry  rose  again  until  at  the  outbreak  of  the  Great 
War  France  had  three-fourths  as  many  acres  in  vines  as  she  had 
in  1875  and  the  yield  was  four-fifths  as  great  as  at  that  time. 


EUROPEAN  GRAPE  GROWING  447 

Spain  is  a  wine  producer,  a  great  raisin  producer,  and  also  has 
an  important  commercial  food-grape  industry  along  her  south- 
ern shore,  especially  near  Malaga  and  Almeria,  which  usually 
supply  most  of  the  four  or  five  million  dollars'  worth  of  grapes 
imported  by  England  each  year.  The  grapes  usually  go  in  casks, 
packed  in  cork  dust,  and  are  familiar  in  American  markets; 
but  in  1917  the  ship  shortage  was  so  great  that  sixty  per  cent, 
of  the  crop  rotted. 

The  style  in  grapes  is  a  good  illustration  of  the  influence  of 
habit  and  cultivated  taste  on  industry.  The  Europeans  scorn 
our  Concords,  Niagaras,  and  other  native  American  grapes  with 
their  distinctive  flavor,  and  while  the  roots  of  these  same  varieties 
are  growing  by  the  tens  of  millions  in  European  vineyards, 
people  look  upon  their  fruit  with  contempt.  On  the  other  hand, 
I  myself  remember  my  profound  disgust  upon  eating  the  much- 
prized  grapes  of  the  famous  vineyards  of  Bingen  on  the  Rhine. 
I  did  not  finish  my  portion,  and  longed  for  a  bunch  of  good 
Concords. 

If  the  world's  wine  industry  is  to  decline,  as  the  war  and 
changing  opinion  promise  it  will,  many  parts  of  Europe  face 
the  necessity  of  cultivating  a  greater  grape-consuming  habit  or 
changing  their  agriculture,  for  the  grape  holds  a  place  of  aston- 
ishing importance  and  is  often  cultivated  with  the  greatest  labor. 

HILLSIDE  GRAPE  GROWING   IN   EUROPE 

In  the  northern  parts  of  the  European  grape-belt  the  desired 
heat  and  sunshine  can  be  obtained  only  by  planting,  the  vine- 
yards on  the  southward  sloping  hillsides.  There  they  are  pro- 
tected from  the  north  winds  and  exposed,  by  the  inclination,  to 
the  practically  direct  rays  of  the  sun ;  they  often  get  in  addition 
the  reflected  sunshine  from  the  surface  of  the  Rhine,  the  Moselle, 
or  the  Swiss  lakes.  Switzerland  has  become  a  wine  producer  by 
utilizing  the  slopes  overlooking  Lake  Geneva  and  the  other 
lakes.  Germany,  with  a  production  of  one-twelfth  that  of 
France,  furnishes  probably  the  best  example  of  hillside  grape 
growing.  The  most  famous  of  the  German  districts  are  on  the 
steep  southern  slopes  to  the  Rhine  and  its  tributaries,  the  Neckar 
and  the  Moselle. 


448  CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

The  vineyards  on  these  riverside  southern  slopes  prosper  in 
latitudes  where  otherwise  they  could  scarcely  exist.  Some  of  the 
Rhine  terraces  have  been  planted  in  grapes  continuously  for  cen- 
turies, and  so  highly  prized  are  certain  brands  of  wine  that 
new  terraces  have  been  built  from  time  to  time  in  places  so 
forbidding  that  a  retaining  wall  had  first  to  be  built  and  earth 
carried  up  from  the  river  banks  in  baskets  (often  by  women), 
before  the  vines  could  be  planted.  One  particular  mountain 
slope  near  Bingen  produces  the  famous  Johannesberger  wine, 
and  is  valued  at  $7,000  per  acre,  the  equivalent  of  $33  per  front 
foot  for  a  building  lot  one  hundred  and  eighty-five  feet  deep. 
These  terraces,  so  steep  that  horses  cannot  climb  them,  are  culti- 
vated entirely  by  hand;  baskets  of  manure  are  carried  up, 
strapped  on  the  backs  of  men  and  women.  So  dense  is  the  popu- 
lation of  these  districts  and  so  great  the  pressure  on  resources 
that  when  the  green  ends  of  the  vines  are  cut  off  in  August  to 
hasten  the  ripening  of  crops,  they  are  carefully  saved  and  fed 
to  the  goats,  and  when  the  vines  are  trimmed  in  winter  the  cut- 
tings are  sold  for  fuel.  In  America  they  are  thrown  away. 

Owing  to  the  scarcity  of  land,  terrace  vineyards  are  common 
on  Italian  hills  and  mountains.  Nearly  two  hundred  terraces, 
one  above  the  other,  may  be  seen  on  the  southern  slope  of  the 
Apennines,  near  Lucca. 

A  change  in  the  purpose  of  European  vineyards  from  drink 
to  food  would  not  augment  Europe's  possibilities  of  maintaining 
increased  population,  because  of  the  high  cash  value  of  export 
wine. 

GRAPE  GROWING  IN   THE  UNITED   STATES 

North  America  has  a  greater  wealth  of  wild  grapevines  than 
has  any  other  continent.  For  hundreds  of  years  before  the  com- 
ing of  the  European  settlers  this  land  had  been  known  among 
the  Norsemen  as  Vineland.  The  early  explorers  were  aston- 
ished to  find  wild  grapevines  reaching  to  the  tops  of  tall  trees 
and  often  attaining  a  thickness  of  half  a  foot  or  even  more.  I 
have  myself  known  cows  to  get  caught  in  their  festooning  stems 
so  that  they  could  not  get  away.  When  the  European  colonists 
on  the  shores  of  North  America  stocked  their  gardens  with  the 


AMERICAN  VARIETIES  449 

plants  and  trees  of  Europe  they  were  pained  and  astonished  to 
find  that  all  the  grapevines  promptly  died  from  some  mysterious 
kind  of  blight  that  destroyed  the  leaves.  This  calamity  was  a 
great  blow  to  the  hopes  of  Virginia  colonists,  who  were  counting 
on  the  vines  to  establish  a  wine  industry,  so  that  they  might  have 
something  to  export,  as  the  basis  of  trade,  to  the  then  agricultural 
mother  country.  The  death  of  the  grapevines  nearly  broke  up 
the  colony  by  destroying  this  chance  of  trade ;  the  colonists  were 
about  to  go  back  when  their  success  in  growing  tobacco  saved 
the  day. 

Their  grapevines  had  died  from  the  effect  of  strange  fungi,  to 
which  the  plant  had  never  been  subjected  in  cool  western  Europe 
or  dry  southern  Europe,  but  which  throve  in  the  heat  and 
humidity  of  the  eastern  American  climate.  After  several  gener- 
ations of  failure  with  European  grapes  the  people  of  the  eastern 
part  of  the  United  States  have  succeeded  in  finding  or  selecting 
a  number  of  native  varieties  of  edible  and  of  wine  grapes,  whose 
names — Concord  (1854),  Clinton,  Niagara,  Delaware  (1850), 
Agawam,  Catawba  (1823),  Early  Ohio,  etc. — show  their 
American  origin. 

There  are  now  two  widely  separated  centers  of  commercial 
grape  growing  in  the  United  States :  the  eastern,  near  the  Great 
Lakes,  and  the  western,  in  California.  The  grape  is  widely 
grown  throughout  the  eastern  and  southern  parts  of  the  country 
as  a  garden  crop,  but  the  cold  waves  of  the  continental  climate 
with  their  late  spring  frosts  make  it  a  little  uncertain  as  a 
money  crop  except  in  localities  where  bodies  of  water  give  pro- 
tection from  frost.  Consequently,  the  eastern  grape-belt  lies 
close  to  the  shores  of  Lake  Erie,  Lake  Ontario,  and  the  five 
slender  lakes  of  New  York,  called  the  Finger  Lakes.  The  vine- 
yards of  the  Finger  Lake  District  grow  on  the  southern  and 
western  slopes  of  the  hills  along  the  eastern  shores  of  the  lakes, 
the  prevalent  west  winds  blowing  across  the  cold  waters  in  spring 
giving  the  desired  temperature.  The  fact  that  New  York  State 
possesses  the  Finger  Lakes  and  touches  the  two  Great  Lakes, 
Ontario  and  Erie,  gives  it  leadership  in  Eastern  grape  growing, 
while  Ohio  with  a  long  stretch  on  Lake  Erie  is  second,  and  Penn- 
sylvania with  one  county  on  the  lake  is  third.  Along  the  south- 
eastern shore  of  Lake  Erie,  especially  on  certain  islands  in  the 


450  CITROUS  FRUITS  AND  THE  GRAPE 

lake  and  even  on  the  Canadian  lee  shore,  the  grape  field  is  much 
the  most  important  field  on  the  farm  and  is  often  the  entire 
dependence  of  the  grower,  who  for  many  years  before  the  Great 
War  got  about  two  cents  a  pound  for  the  fruit.  The  grapes  of 
this  Eastern  district  are  chiefly  of  the  Concord  and  Niagara  varie- 
ties, which  are  highly  prized  as  table  grapes  and  are  widely 
shipped  to  the  cities,  small  towns,  and  country  districts  of  the 
Eastern  and  Central  States.  They  are  far  cheaper,  sweeter,  and 
more  generally  liked  than  the  European  varieties  of  edible  grapes. 

California,  with  her  Mediterranean  climate,  has  become  a 
second  Mediterranean  country  in  other  respects  as  well  as  in  the 
production  of  citrous  and  dried  fruits.  The  climate  has  attracted 
Italian  and  Swiss  vine  growers  who  have  formed  colonies  and 
grow  the  European  grapes  which  thrive  in  this  part  of  America. 

Two  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  acres  of  land,  usually  level, 
and  for  the  most  part  in  the  Great  Valley,  have  for  some  time 
been  devoted  to  grapes  with  a  yield  per  acre  greater  than  that 
of  any  other  region  in  the  world.  This  high  yield  is  due  partly 
to  the  richness  of  the  deep  valley  soil,  new  to  grapes,  and  partly 
to  the  fact  that  the  European  growers  devote  themselves  to  varie- 
ties with  special  qualities  but  often  with  low  yield.  European 
varieties  of  grapes,  grown  in  California,  are  sent  over  the  whole 
eastern  part  of  the  United  States,  where  they  are  sold  at  a  price 
much  higher  than  that  of  the  Lake  Erie  grapes.  Wine  manu- 
facture has  been  taken  up  with  considerable  success,  and  some  of 
the  product  is  exported,  although  the  choice  brands  of  Europe 
are  still  far  higher  in  reputation  and  price. 

The  prohibition  of  the  manufacture  of  wine  has  been  post- 
poned in  California  for  a  period  long  enough  to  give  the  wine 
grape  growers  a  chance  to  change  to  some  other  industry,  such 
as  table  or  raisin  grapes,  which  already  take  up  about  half  of 
the  grape  area  of  California. 

It  is  needless  to  point  out  that  the  possibility  of  increasing 
the  quantity  of  grapes  grown  in  the  United  States  is  quite  indefi- 
nite. Good  grape  land  many  times  as  extensive  as  the  present 
grape  area  awaits  cultivation ;  but  the  farmer  holds  back  because 
of  the  fact  that  the  selling  price  ordinarily  leaves  small  margin 
of  profit.  It  is  doubtless  true  that  the  grape  consumption  in  the 
United  States  could  be  greatly  increased  if  the  fruit  were  more 


GRAPE  RESOURCES  451 

economically  marketed.  It  is  not  at  all  uncommon  for  the 
farmer  to  receive  a  cent  and  a  half  a  pound  for  the  grapes  which 
the  consumer  buys  in  a  three-pound  basket  for  five,  six,  or  seven 
cents  a  pound.  The  putting  of  grapes  into  little  three-pound 
baskets  is  a  shameful  waste  of  wood.  Grapes  usually  keep  many 
days,  and  might  just  as  well  go  to  market  in  a  package  requiring 
less  wood  per  pound  of  grapes,  and  hence  permitting  them  to  be 
sold  more  cheaply  and  consumed  more  extensively. 

Large  areas  of  excellent  grape  land  lie  unused  in  the  south 
temperate  zone.  Fine  grapes  are  grown  for  wine  and  table  use 
in  the  sub-tropic  dry  summer  regions  of  Argentina,  Chile,  South 
Australia,  and  South  Africa.  It  is  probably  true  that  each  of 
these  localities  has  an  area  of  grape  land  large  enough  to  supply 
all  the  United  States  or  all  Europe  with  table  grapes  and  raisins, 
if  the  demand  should  arise.  Table  grapes  from  these  regions,  of 
course,  would  be  ripe  in  our  winter  and  the  raisins  could  easily 
be  shipped.  There  is  now  a  small  export  in  normal  times  of 
table  grapes  from  South  Africa  to  Britain  in  the  winter  season. 
There  is  no  reason  why  this  traffic  might  not  be  organized  so  that 
such  cities  as  Chicago,  or  Edinburgh,  could  have  good  table 
grapes  of  the  American  varieties  at  six  cents  a  pound  retail  in 
April.  It  is  chiefly  a  question  of  the  organization  of  marketing 
— a  Avork  which  we  have  as  yet  barely  begun. 


CHAPTER  XXII 
SUGAR 

SOURCE  AND  HISTORY  OF  SUGAR 

MAN,  as  we  now  know  him,  has  filled  himself  with  protein  ever 
since  he  began  getting  walnuts  and  snails  from  beneath  the  trees 
and  fat  grubs  from  under  fallen  logs,  and  with  starches  ever 
since  he  began  to  eat  the  wild  acorn  and  the  wild  banana;  but, 
although  he  has  long  known  the  taste  of  wild  honey,  sugar,  as  a 
staple  of  diet,  is  one  of  the  new  foods  to  the  man  of  cool 
climates.  The  appearance  and  use  of  sugar  affords  a  good  ex- 
ample of  the  service  of  science  to  man  and  of  the  changes  that 
we  may  expect  in  our  food  supply  in  this  century.  Sugar  has 
been  all  around  us  for  countless  ages,  but  we  did  not  know  how 
to  get  it.  The  bees  knew  better  than  man  how  to  get  sugar; 
hence  the  high  appreciation  of  honey  in  the  Scriptures  and  other 
ancient  literature,  for  it  was  about  the  only  source  for  this  tooth- 
some sweet,  sought  alike  by  man  and  most  of  his  beasts.  In 
Queen  Elizabeth's  time  a  pound  of  sugar  cost  as  much  as  a 
quarter  of  veal. 

There  was  a  time  in  the  Middle  Ages — and  that  is,  after  all,  not 
many  generations  ago — when  the  only  sweet  things  man  had  were 
honey,  raisins,  and  such  things  as  sweet  fruits.  Sugars  were  unknown 
and  probably  not  liked  by  hosts  of  our  ancestors — there  are  some  today 
who  do  not  care  for  sweets;  but  the  sugar  habit,  like  the  tobacco  habit 
or  the  chewing-gum  habit  or  the  alcohol  habit,  is  going  to  bring  about 
acute  suffering  in  those  who  must  give  it  up  or  curtail  it,  just  as  the 
bread  habit  and  the  meat  habit  are  hard  to  change.* 

When  King  John  of  France  was  being  taken  to  England  after  the 
battle  of  Poitiers  and  one  of  the  principal  items  of  his  expenditures 
was  for  sugar,  one  of  the  kingly  luxuries  of  the  day,  could  be  possibly 
have  imagined  that  the  time  would  come  when  a  descendant  of  a  West 

*Fairchild,  David:  "The  Palate  of  Civilized  Man  and  Its  Influence  on 
Agriculture,"  Journal  of  Franklin  Institute,  March,  1918,  p.  312. 

452 


THE  PER  CAPITA  CONSUMPTION  453 

African  slave,  in  a  continent  yet  undiscovered,  would  remark  in  the 
language  of  his  captors,  "  It  just  seems  like  somebody  was  dead  in  the 
house  to  have  no  sugar."  These  are  consequences  of  food  habits.* 

In  1821  the  people  of  the  United  States  consumed  eight  pounds 
of  sugar  per  capita ;  in  1850  the  amount  had  increased  to  thirty 
pounds,  and  in  1915  to  eighty.  In  the  first  ten  months  of  1917 
sugar  was  being  consumed  at  the  rate  of  ninety-one  pounds  per 
capita,  according  to  the  great  sugar  authorities,  Willet  and  Gray. 
This  increase  was  due  partly  to  the  campaign  for  canned  food, 
partly  also  to  the  greater  earnings  of  the  American  working 
man,  bringing  greater  opportunity  to  indulge  in  luxuries. 

Sugar  is  almost  the  only  article  of  our  diet  that  is  entirely 
digestible,  and  it  is  also  very  peculiar  in  that  it  is  comprised 
entirely  of  one  element,  namely,  carbohydrate,  without  a  trace 
of  either  protein  or  fat.  It  therefore  comes  in  the  class  of  pure 
fuels  and  the  amount  we  are  eating  at  the  present  time,  according 
to  Lusk,  is  enough  to  give  us  twenty  per  cent,  of  the  total  energy 
requirement  of  the  American  people. 

"Cane  sugar  is  a  valuable  condiment,  and  when  taken  in  small 
quantities  every  half -hour  may  delay  the  onset  of  fatigue,  "f 
This  practice  has  been  tested  many  times,  and  owing  to  the 
almost  instantaneous  digestibility  of  sugar,  it  nourishes  almost 
as  quickly  as  a  stimulant  stimulates,  and  is  much  better  for  us. 

We  get  sugar  at  the  present  time  from  two  main  sources,  sugar 
beet  and  sugar  cane ;  but  one  or  the  other  of  these  may  at  any 
time  have  a  successor  as  a  result  of  changes  in  science  or  agri- 
cultural practice,  for  sugar  is  one  of  the  common  elements  of  a 
great  variety  of  plants.  Nearly  all  plants  have  it  in  their  sap 
at  some  time  in  their  growth ;  consequently  there  are  many  pos- 
sible sources  of  sugar.  Many  plants  store  sugar  which  can  be 
used  in  other  seasons,  just  as  other  plants  store  and  use  starch. 
All  fruits  contain  some  sugar,  the  grape  being  especially  rich 
(see  raisins),  and  some  sugar  is  found  even  in  the  onion.  The 
more  important  of  the  sugar-storing  plants  are  beets,  carrots,  and 
parsnips,  which  hoard  it  for  use  in  the  second  year  of  their 
growth  to  make  with  a  sudden  rush  their  heavy  top,  blossom, 

*  Fairchild,  David:  "  Forming  New  Fashions  in  Food,"  in  National  Geo- 
graphic Magazine,  April,  1018. 

t  Lusk:  Food  in  War  Time,  p.  41. 


454  SUGAR 

and  seed.  The  date  palm,  Palmyra  palm,  and  coconut  palm 
of  the  tropical  zone  are  used  to  some  extent  for  sugar  manufac- 
ture in  the  lands  of  their  growth.  The  American  Indian  took 
sugar  from  maple  trees.  The  sugar  cane,  a  plant  much  resem- 
bling an  earless  stalk  of  corn  filled  with  sweet  juice,  grows 
throughout  the  moister  parts  of  the  tropics  and  in  its  natural 
condition  is  so  superior  to  other  sugar  yielders  that  it  was  for 
ages  practically  the  only  source  of  commercial  sugar  supply, 
except  the  primeval  sugar  supply  of  honey  (the  sugar  of  blos- 
soms), which  was  much  more  important  in  past  centuries  than  it 
has  been  since  other  sources  of  sugar  have  been  developed.  In 
the  shortage  produced  by  the  Great  War  the  price  of  honey  rose 
more  than  that  of  sugar  itself,  because  its  price  and  use  were 
not  controlled. 

The  general  and  heavy  use  of  sugar  among  people  of  the 
temperate  zone  is  recent,  almost  as  recent  as  the  discovery  of 
petroleum,  and  it  has  rapidly  passed  from  a  luxury  to  a  neces- 
sity. In  1700,  fifty  thousand  tons  per  year  were  used  in  all 
countries  of  Europe.  At  the  present  time,  that  quantity  lasts 
the  United  States  about  four  days.  During  the  last  century 
there  has  been  a  sevenfold  increase  in  the  world's  commerce  in 
sugar,  and  the  people  of  the  world  are  using  more  and  more  per 
capita  each  year. 

SUGAR 

Exports:  Average  tons,  1909-13 

Austria-Hungary  848,000 

Barbados  25,000 

Belgium  154,000 

Brazil  38,000 

British  Guiana  106,000 

British  India  26,000 

China  14,000 

Cuba  2,000.000 

Dominican  Republic  92,000 

Dutch  East  Indies  1,412,000 

Egypt  8,000 

Fiji  78,000 

France  206,000 

Germany  873,000 

Guadeloupe  37,000 

Martinique  42,000 

Mauritius  226,000 


SUGAR  TRADE 


455 


Exports : 

Netherlands 

Peru 

Philippine  Islands 

Reunion 

Russia 

Trinidad  and  Tobago 

United  Kingdom 

Other  countries 

Total 
Imports : 

Argentina 

Australia 

British  India 

British  South  Africa 

Canada 

Chile 

China 

Denmark 

Egypt 

Finland 

France 

Italy 

Japan 

Netherlands 

New  Zealand 

Norway 

Persia 

Portugal 

Singapore 

Switzerland 

United  Kingdom 

United  States 

Other  countries 

Total 


Average  tons,  1909-13 

82,000 
146,000 
179,000 

41,000 
293,000 

43,000 

32,000 
330,000 


7,472,000 

51,000 
76,000 

715,000 
30,000 

297,000 
84,000 

343,000 
21,000 
43,000 
50,000 

186,000 
9,000 

176,000 

200,000 
62,000 
52,000 

109,000 
39,000 
81,000 

118,000 
1,853,000 
2,987,000 

513,000 

7,989,000  • 


The  Great  War  took  place  in  the  midst  of  the  greatest  sugar 
field  of  the  world  and  the  blockades  stopped  the  greatest  sugar 
trade — that  between  Germany,  the  greatest  producer,  and 
Britain,  the  greatest  per  capita  user  and  a  great  importer. 
Britain  had  to  shift  from  beet  to  cane  sugar,  from  near  to  far 
sources  of  supply,  and  one  of  the  first  acts  of  her  government 

*  Year  Book  of  Department  of  Agriculture,  1917,  p.  695. 


SUGAR 

after  it  entered  the  commercial  field  late  in  1914  was  to  buy  such 
quantities  of  sugar  that  her  ports  were  choked. 

UNITED    KINGDOM    CANE    SUGAR    IMPORT,   BEFORE    AND 
DURING  THE  WAR* 


1911 

1913 

1915 

1916 

Cuba 

3,000 

224,000 

359,000 

553,000  long  tons 

Java 

166,000 

398,000 

383,000 

Philippines 

3,000 

6,000 

68,000 

Peru 

27,000 

27,000 

31,000 

50,000 

Mauritius 

55,000 

20,000 

191,000 

108,000 

U.  S.  A.  refined 

188,000 

267,000 

267,083      271,888      1,176,000      1,432,000 


THE   PERFECTION   OF   THE   SUGAR    BEET 

Sugar  is  one  of  the  few  commodities  in  which  there  is  com- 
petition in  production  between  the  cool  temperate  and  the  tropic 
regions.  During  the  last  sixty  years,  cane-sugar  producers  and 
beet-sugar  producers  have  striven  for  the  markets;  this  rivalry 
will  doubtless  continue  for  decades  to  come. 

It  is  probably  due  to  the  Napoleonic  wars  that  the  beet  has 
become  a  great  source  of  sugar  supply.  The  military  and  com- 
mercial blockades  of  these  wars  cut  off  France  and  often  the 
rest  of  Europe  from  the  slave-grown  cane-sugar  supply  of  tropic 
colonies.  At  the  order  of  Napoleon,  French  scientists  examined 
hundreds  of  plants  in  the  search  for  a  promising  sugar  supply. 
Among  them  the  grape  and  the  beet  were  most  seriously  con- 
sidered because  of  their  large  content  of  sugar,  but  industrial 
effort  centered  itself  on  the  beet,  which  the  Germans  first  used 
in  1799.  In  1806  the  French  Government  offered  a  bounty  for 
beet-sugar  production,  and  in  1811  Napoleon  ordered  eighty 
thousand  acres  of  beets  to  be  grown  for  sugar.  Only  one  sugar 
factory  survived  the  Napoleonic  wars  and  the  renewed  com- 
petition of  cane,  but  the  industry  lingered  until  finally  by  the 
middle  of  the  nineteenth  century  it  had  become  firmly  estab- 
lished. 

This  beet-sugar  industry  affords  a  convincing  example  of  the 
service  of  science  to  industry.  The  wild  beet  was  a  slen- 

*"The  American  Sugar  Refining  Company,"  1917. 


THE  INCREASING  SUGAR  OF  THE  BEET         457 

derly  rooted  plant,  growing  in  sandy  soil  in  southern  Europe 
and  first  cultivated  about  300  to  200  B.C.  In  1836  it  took 
eighteen  pounds  of  beets  to  make  a  pound  of  sugar;  in  1882 
about  ten  pounds  sufficed;  in  1904  less  than  seven  pounds  yielded 
a  pound  of  sugar.  This  great  improvement  has  been  brought 
about  chiefly  in  Germany,  where  on  large  sugar  plantations 
trained  scientists,  often  doctors  of  philosophy  in  chemistry, 
devoted  their  whole  time  to  improving  the  sugar  content  of  the 
beets.  Samples  are  cut  from  the  most  promising  roots  and 
tested;  the  best  beets  only  are  saved  to  produce  seed  the  next 
year — a  process  continued  for  generation  after  generation  of  the 
plant.  This  systematic  selection  has,  within  the  life  span  of 
man,  trebled  the  sugar  content  of  beets  and,  along  with  improve- 
ments in  the  process  of  sugar  extraction,  has  made  possible  one 
of  the  greatest  agricultural  industries  of  the  temperate  zone. 
The  process  of  improvement  has  not  yet  ended.  The  percentage 
of  sugar  in  the  beet  crop  of  the  United  States  rose  from  14.8 
per  cent,  to  16.35  per  cent,  between  1901  and  1910.  In  1917  it 
was  18.48  per  cent,  from  the  California  crop.  In  eight  years 
the  percentage  of  sugar  extracted  from  American  beets  rose  from 
10.95  per  cent,  to  12.56  per  cent. — 14  per  cent,  increase  in  the 
amount  of  sugar  produced  per  ton. 

CLIMATIC  REQUIREMENT   AND   EUROPEAN  DEVELOPMENT  OF  THE 
BEET-SUGAR   INDUSTRY 

While  the  beet  will  grow  in  a  very  wide  range  of  territory 
from  the  tropic  nearly  to  the  arctic  zone,  the  conditions  for  beet- 
sugar  production  are  exacting — a  moderate  amount  of  spring 
and  summer  rain  and  a  moderate  heat,  though  not  too  hot,  and 
a  cool,  dry  autumn.  Most  climates  suitable  for  corn,  for 
example,  are  too  warm  in  midsummer.  The  cool  climates  of 
England  and  Sweden  suffice  for  the  beet.  It  is  therefore  obvious 
that  corn  and  sugar  beets  are  rare  competitors,  except  along  the 
margins  of  the  two  zones  as  in  lower  Michigan.  Irrigation  in 
America  gives  the  best  conditions  for  beet  growing,  and  the  arid 
region  rarely  suite  corn.  In  its  soil  requirements,  the  beet  is 
also  exacting — deep  fertile  loam,  well  drained  and  aerated.  It 
also  needs  lime  and  an  abundance  of  available  plant  food.  In 


458  SUGAR 

Europe  the  best  region  for  beets  is  the  great  northern  plain  from 
Normandy  to  central  Russia.  Germany  is  the  leading  producer, 
and  in  1900  so  great  had  the  industry  become  that  sixty  per 
cent,  of  the  German  product  was  exported.  Germany  and  Bel- 
gium began  to  export  shortly  after  1870,  Russia  in  1888,  France 
in  1889,  and  Holland  in  1895.  Spain  depended  entirely  on  sugar 
from  Cuba  and  the  Philippines  while  she  ruled  them,  but  after 
losing  these  possessions  in  1898,  she  began  at  once  to  grow  sugar 
beets  in  her  northern  provinces  with  such  astonishing  rapidity 
that  her  local  production  rose  from  2  million  pounds  in  1896  to 
113  million  in  1899,  and  207  million  in  1903,  enough  for  the  home 
demand.  Southern  Sweden  and  southern  Denmark  have  also 
taken  up  the  industry,  but  have  not  become  sugar  exporters. 

RELATION    OF   SUGAR   BEET    TO   INTENSIVE   AGRICULTURE 

The  growing  of  sugar  beets  is  an  intensive  agricultural  in- 
dustry. The  soil  must  be  finely  prepared,  and  plowed  so  deeply 
that  a  subsoil  plow  must  often  follow  the  ordinary  plow.  Caring 
for  the  crop  is  most  laborious  because  of  the  large  amount  of 
hand  labor  required.  The  young  plant  is  so  small  that  only 
human  fingers  can  rescue  it  from  the  upspringing  weeds,  so 
that  men,  women,  and  children,  especially  women  and  children, 
go  into  the  fields  in  nearly  all  beet  regions,  including  the  United 
States,  and  spend  days  upon  their  knees  weeding  the  young  beets. 
A  little  later,  when  the  plants  have  become  established,  they  must 
be  thinned  out  with  the  hoe.  Thus  far  the  inventors  of  machin- 
ery have  been  unable  to  replace  either  of  these  kinds  of  hand 
labor. 

After  the  plant  is  established  there  must  be  many  cultivations. 
In  the  late  autumn  the  beets  are  plowed  out  of  the  ground  and 
the  tops  pulled  off.  The  roots  are  then  piled,  covered  with 
straw  and  sometimes  with  earth,  until  delivered  to  factories  by 
wagon,  train,  or  boat  throughout  the  winter  months.  The  beet- 
sugar  factory  to  be  economical  must  be  large,  costing  before  the 
war  a  million  dollars  or  more.  Hence  it  is  to  the  factory  owner's 
interest  to  encourage  beet  growing,  and  in  America,  as  in  Ger- 
many, the  sugar  manufacturer,  through  contracts  with  the 
farmer,  controls  the  crop  rotation,  the  method  of  beet  growing, 


EUROPEAN  BEET  CROP 


459 


and,  to  the  community's  benefit,  becomes  virtually  a  teacher  of 
agriculture.  The  beets  are  ground  to  pieces,  the  sugar  soaked 
out  of  them  in  hot  water,  and  finally  crystallized  and  sent  to  the 
refinery  to  be  put  into  final  form.  It  is  common  for  American 
beet-sugar  factories  to  have  refineries  also. 

The  by-products  of  the  beet  field  serve  greatly  to  enhance  the 
usefulness  of  this  crop  in  the  intensive  agriculture  of  a  populous 
country.  The  leaves  and  tops  of  the  beets  were  worth  for  cattle 


FIG.   121. — Europe,  sugar-beet  acreage.     Each  dot  equals  1,000  acren. 
(Finch  and  Baker.) 


food  $4.50  to  $5.75  per  acre  in  Germany  a  few  years  ago.  This 
figure  makes  an  interesting  comparison  with  the  $12.20  which 
was  the  farm  value  of  the  average  acre  of  wheat  in  the  United 
States  in  1913. 

The  pulp  from  which  the  sugar  has  been  extracted  is  taken 
back  by  the  farmers  and  fed  to  cattle,  and  the  average  value  of 
this  food  in  Germany  was  $10.40  per  acre,  whereas  the  average 
American  hay  crop  in  the  years  1896-1905  was  worth  on  the 
American  farm  $14.41  per  acre,  a  figure  that  is  less  than  the 
value  of  combined  pulp  and  leaves  of  the  German  beet  crop. 


460  SUGAR 

It  is,  therefore,  evident  that  beet  growing  plays  an  important 
part  in  the  stock  farming  on  the  small  farms  of  northern  Europe. 
The  European  beet  farms  are  almost  always  well  cared  for, 
because  the  beet-manufacturing  companies,  to  assure  themselves 
an  abundance  of  beets,  insist  in  their  contracts  with  the  grower 
that  a  certain  rotation  of  crops  shall  be  followed.  Furthermore, 
the  care  and  fertilizing  required  by  the  beet  leaves  the  field  in 
excellent  condition  for  the  production  of  a  fine  crop  of  small 
grain  the  succeeding  year.  This  rotation  results  in  such  in- 
creased yields  of  grain  per  acre  that  it  is  said  that  the  addition 
of  beets  to  the  crop  rotation  has  not  reduced  the  total  grain  yield 
of  the  beet  districts.  The  beet  acreage  of  the  entire  world  is 
surprisingly  small.  With  her  huge  sugar  export  before  the  war, 
Germany  raised  her  whole  crop  on  but  one  and  one-third  million 
acres  of  ground — a  matter  of  two  thousand  square  miles,  less 
than  one  per  cent,  of  her  total  area.  Yet  she  was  able  to  export 
to  England  nearly  a  billion  tons  of  sugar  in  the  year  1913. 


THE  ACREAGE,  PRODUCTION,  AND  VALUE  OF  THE  LEAD- 
ING CROPS  IN  GERMANY  FOR  FIVE  AVERAGE 
YEARS,  1898-1902 

Per  cent, 

tilled  Average 

land  in         Area  Estimated       value 

Crop       Germany     (acres)            Production  value       per  acre 

Rye                23      14,696,478      345,771,316  bu.  $302,646,524      $21 

Oats               16      10,223,409      485,647,752    "  259,898,923        25 

Wheat             8        4,709,031      130,038,110    "  135,046,363        29 

Barley              6        4,175,750      139,959,940     "  108,000,331        26 

Potatoes        12        7,902,374      528,094,827    "  318,651,012        40 

Sugar  beets    2        1,091,632        14,893,089  tons  60,167,934        55 


The  small  acreage  actually  and  proportionally  that  produces 
the  European  beet  crop  is  another  proof  of  its  fitness  for  inten- 
sive agriculture.  Belgium,  the  most  densely  peopled  of  all 
Western  countries,  has  only  three  per  cent,  of  her  area  in  this 
crop,  but  has  long  been  a  regular  sugar  exporter.  Germany, 
with  the  most  fully  developed  agriculture  of  any  of  the  large 
nations,  became  a  heavy  exporter  with  a  sugar  area  one-sixth 


AN  INTENSIVE  CROP  461 

the  size  of  her  potato  area  and  one-thirteenth  the  size  of  her  rye 
area. 


EUROPEAN  CENTERS  OP  PRODUCTION 

The  map  of  beet  production  in  Europe  shows  that  while  its 
growth  is  scattered  throughout  central  Europe,  from  north- 
western Spain  to  Moscow,  there  are  four  centers  of  importance. 
The  greatest  is  in  the  chalky  soils  of  Holland,  Belgium,  and 
the  north  of  France  between  Paris  and  the  English  Channel. 
This  is  economically  one  region  separated  only  by  imaginary 
political  boundaries  across  which  the  beets  are  freely  passed  to 
the  nearest  factories  without  tax  or  duty.  Another  great  region 
is  in  central  Germany,  near  Magdeburg,  where  beets  occupy  from 
one-tenth  to  one-seventh  of  all  the  cultivated  land.  Here  the 
beet  fields  spread  in  great  expanses  over  the  level,  perfectly  tilled 
plains;  and,  while  the  peasant  children  pull  weeds,  their 
mothers,  even  before  the  war,  could  be  seen  plowing  the  beets, 
using  at  times  the  family  cow  for  a  draft  animal.  During  the 
winter  the  manufacture  of  the  sugar  occupies  much  of  the  labor- 
ing population  and  the  by-products  help  to  feed  the  animals  on 
the  farms.  This  district  is  well  situated  for  export  of  sugar 
because  it  is  on  the  navigable  Elbe,  which  carries  nine-tenths  of 
the  traffic  in  this  territory. 

Northern  Bohemia,  in  the  plains  around  Prague,  also  on  the 
navigable  Elbe,  has  raised  much  of  the  Austrian  crop.  In  south- 
western Russia  a  large  part  of  the  level  plain  centering  in  the 
Kief  district,  in  the  Ukraine,  is  a  beet  section  where,  although 
the  yield  is  only  about  half  (seven  and  one-half  tons  per  acre) 
that  of  Germany  (twelve  tons  per  acre)  and  their  sugar  content 
lower,  beets  are  extensively  grown  and  the  acreage  of  about  two 
million,  larger  than  that  of  any  other  country. 


GOVERNMENT   INFLUENCE    AND   THE   BRUSSELS    CONFERENCE 

The  sugar  industry  is  one  to  which  governments  have  given 
much  attention  and  about  which  many  laws  for  both  protection 
and  taxation  have  been  made.  In  many  countries  the  sugar 
industry  exists  only  by  the  special  privilege  of  government  pro- 


462  SUGAR 

tection.  Throughout  central  Europe  sugar  has  generally  been 
high  in  price  because  practically  all  the  producing  nations  have  a 
protective  tariff  to  keep  out  foreign  sugar  and  in  addition  an 
excise  or  local  tax  of  several  cents  a  pound  on  sugar.  Thus,  in 
1902,  the  German  excise  tax  was  two  cents  and  the  French  tax 
five  and  one-fourth  cents  per  pound.  The  consequent  high  prices 
lowered  sugar  consumption.  England,  which  has  no  tax  on 
sugar  and  whose  sugar  price  is  therefore  the  cheapest  in  the 
world,  had  in  1902  a  sugar  consumption  of  ninety  pounds  per 
person ;  that  of  the  United  States  with  a  two  cent  tax  *  was 
seventy-one  pounds ;  while  the  Russians  and  Spaniards  ate  one- 
sixth  as  much,  the  French  one-fourth,  the  Germans  less  than  a 
half,  and  the  Italians  but  a  tenth.  When  the  production  in 
Germany,  Austria,  and  other  countries  of  Europe  was  greater 
than  the  consumption,  sugar  could  not  without  loss  be  sold  in 
foreign  countries  until  after  the  excise  tax  had  been  repaid  by 
the  government.  For  example,  the  German  manufacturer  who 
paid  his  excise  of  two  cents  per  pound,  could  not  get  more  than 
three  cents  per  pounds  for  his  sugar  in  England,  leaving  him  one 
cent  for  the  sugar  unless  the  government  refunded  the  excise 
upon  the  exported  sugar.  This  the  government  did,  and,  as  an 
encouragement  to  foreign  trade,  the  export  refund  or  "draw 
back"  was  usually  made  larger  than  the  excise,  and,  therefore, 
resulted  in  a  bounty  on  export  sugar. 

The  industry  was  further  complicated  by  the  formation  of 
sugar  trusts  by  the  refiners  in  Germany  and  other  countries. 
There  refiners'  trusts  raised  the  price  to  the  people  of  the  home 
country,  and  because  of  large  profits  from  this  source  could 
afford  to  sell  the  surplus  abroad  at  exceedingly  low  prices.  When 
Germany,  France,  Austria-Hungary,  Holland,  Belgium,  and 
Russia  were  thus  partly  paying  for  the  exported  sugar,  it  became 
an  expensive  business  for  those  governments,  but  one  from  which 
the  two  great  importing  countries,  United  States  and  England, 
chiefly  profited.  These  bounties  so  stimulated  production  on  the 
continent  of  Europe  that  surpluses  of  sugar  accumulated  and 
the  competition  with  cane  sugar  became  so  keen  that  the  British 
sugar-producing  colonies  of  Jamaica,  the  other  West  Indian 

*  The  United  States  has  had  for  many  years  an  import  duty  of  two 
cents  or  more  per  pound. 


SUGAR  LEGISLATION  463 

Islands,  and  Guiana  suffered  great  depression  on  account  of 
the  reduced  price  of  sugar.  To  protect  her  colonies,  England 
threatened  to  lay  on  all  sugar  imported  into  that  country  a 
tax  that  would  just  equal  the  bounty  that  it  had  received  in 
the  export  country.  This  would  benefit  the  British  treasury  at 
the  direct  expense  of  continental  treasuries.  To  seek  means  of 
relief,  a  sugar  convention  was  called  at  Brussels  in  1901  and 
1902,  at  which  most  of  the  European  countries  agreed  to  stop 
all  export  bounties  whatever.  As  a  result  the  world's  sugar 
exporting  went  forward  on  a  more  normal  basis.  The  removal 
of  export  bounties  lowered  the  prices  in  exporting  countries  and 
raised  it  in  importing  countries.  Thus  England  saved  her 
colonies  from  the  competition  of  sugar  made  cheap  by  export 
bounty  and  the  people  of  beet-growing  countries  had  for  the  first 
time  cheap  sugar  for  home  consumption.  The  result  was  instant 
increase  in  consumption  in  beet-growing  countries.  In  Germany 
this  increase  amounted  to  fifty  per  cent,  in  a  year  and  in  France 
consumption  was  nearly  doubled.  All  this  legislative  tinkering 
had  an  interesting  effect  on  the  race  between  the  two  great  sugar 
plants,  the  beet  and  the  cane. 


COMPETITION   OF  BEET   AND    CANE 

During  the  fifty  years  before  the  Brussels  convention,  the  pro- 
portion of  beet  sugar  had  increased  from  fourteen  per  cent,  of 
the  total  world  production  to  sixty-four  per  cent. ;  but  the  revival 
of  the  cane  industry  in  Cuba  and  other  tropic  countries  and  the 
decrease  in  the  planting  of  beets  in  Europe,  after  the  Brussels 
convention,  caused  it  to  fall  to  fifty-eight  per  cent,  in  three  years. 
By  1910  the  cane  was  again  ahead.  (During  the  period  of  the 
Great  War  the  cane  had  undisturbed  opportunity,  while 
the  war  ravaged  the  greatest  beet-producing  region  of  the 
world,  the  north  of  France  and  Belgium.)  As  a  result  the  pro- 
duction of  beet  sugar  has  fallen  off  3,500,000  tons  during  the 
war  period,  while  the  production  of  cane  sugar  has  increased 
1,300,000  tons.  The  total  production  of  beet  and  cane  in  1917 
was  about  eleven  per  cent,  below  that  of  the  pre-war  period. 

As  a  natural  result  of  the  labor  and  climate  required,  the 
sugar-beet  industry  was  established  late  in  the  United  States, 


464 


SUGAR 


despite  great  land  resources  for  it.     Production  was  only  3,000 
tons  in   1890,  but,  stimulated  by   a  high-tariff-made   price,   it 


Tons 
11,500,000 

11,000,000 
10,500,000 

10,000,000 
9,500,000 
9,000,000 
8,500,000 
8,000,000 
7,500,000 
7,000,000 
6,500,000 
6,000,000 
5,500,000 
5,000,000 
4,500,000 
4,000,000 
3,500,000 
3,000,000 
2,500,000 
2,000,000 
1,500,000 
1,000,000 
500,000 
0 

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FIG.  122. — Competition  of  cane  and  beet  sugar. — World  Production. 


reached  184,000  tons  in  1900;  400,000  tons  in  1906  (surpassing 
the  cane  crop) ;  500,000  in  1911;  800,000  in  1915.  The  threat- 
ened famine  of  the  war  stimulated  production  and  increased  the 


BEET  AND  CANE  IN  AMERICA 


465 


acreage  from  480,000  in  1914  to  665,000  in  1916.*  As  almost 
all  of  the  American  seed  supply  had  been  imported  from  Ger- 
many, there  were  many  interesting  and  romantic  adventures  in 
the  getting  of  good  beet  seed  out  of  Germany  by  bribery,  smug- 
gling, and  long  detours,  including  caravan  journeys  through 
central  Asia.  The  United  States  is  now  nearly  independent  for 
a  time  at  least  of  foreign-grown  seed.  The  possible  beet  area 
of  the  United  States  is  several  times  as  large  as  the  possible  cane 
area,  and  seems  to  follow  rather  closely  the  July  isotherm  of 
70°,  which  traverses  the  country  in  long  detours,  from  Maine 
to  California,  giving  us  a  widely  scattered  sugar-belt  which  skirts 
the  northern  and  western  edge  of  the  corn-belt. 

The  sugar  beet  thus  offers  a  money  crop  to  the  American 
farmer  in  those  regions  where  the  climate  is  a  little  too  cool  for 
the  maximum  development  of  corn. 

The  beet  with  its  heavy  labor  requirements  did  not  interest 
the  American  farmer  while  corn  land  was  still  to  be  had  for 
the  taking.  The  peculiar  fitness  of  sugar  for  irrigation  farming 
is  shown  by  the  great  labor  required,  the  large  yield,  and  the 
concentrated  and  valuable  product.  Most  of  the  crop  is  grown 
on  irrigated  soil.  The  relative  importance  in  some  American 
localities  is  as  great  as  in  any  part  of  Germany.  At  the  last 
census,  Eddy  County,  New  Mexico,  had  fifteen  per  cent,  of  the 
improved  land  in  beets,  while  Bay  County,  Michigan,  had  thir- 
teen per  cent,  and  Ventura  County,  California,  and  Spokane 
County,  Washington,  had  six  per  cent.  each. 

•SUGAR  PRODUCTION  IN  UNITED  STATES  AND  ITS  POSSESSIONS 

(in  tons) 


Beet 
sugar 
(chiefly 
refined) 

Louis- 
iana 

Other 
states 

Porto 
Rica 

Hawaii 

Philip- 
pine 
Islands 

Total 

1901-02  

184,000 
512,000 
510,000 
599,000 
692,000 
733,000 
722,000 
874,000 

360,000 
364,000 
242,000 
352,000 
153,000 
292,000 
242,000 
137,000 

4,000 
11,000 
12,000 
8,000 
9,000 
7,000 
3,000 
1,000 

103,000 
346,000 
349,000 
371,000 
398,000 
351,000 
346,000 
483,000 

355,000 
517,000 
566,000 
595,000 
546,000 
612,000 
646,000 
592,000 

75,000 
140,000 
164,000 
205,000 
345,000 
408,000 
421,000 
412,000 

1,082,000 
1,892,000 
1,946,000 
2,131,000 
2,144,000 
2,405,000 
2,382,000 
2,601,000 

1009-10  
1910-11  

1911-12  
1912-13  

1913-14  

1914-15  

1915-16  

466  SUGAR 

It  is  quite  common  in  the  beet-growing  districts  of  the  United 
States  for  the  hand  labor  to  be  done  on  contract  by  newly 
arrived  immigrants.  A  peasant  from  Rumania,  Hungary,  or 
Poland,  accustomed  to  growing  beets,  and  to  a  low  standard  of 
living,  contracts  at  so  much  per  acre  to  take  care  of  the  beet 


FIG.  123. — Women  and  children  weeding  a  sugar-beet  field, 
western   United  States.      (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 


fields.     With  the  assistance  of  his  wife  and  children  he  then 
takes  entire  charge  of  the  crop  for  the  American  farmer. 

The  harvest  conditions  make  irrigation  favorable  to  beet 
growing.  Irrigation  insures  a  dry  October,  a  month  in  which 
warm  rains  can  do  much  injury  to  the  beets.  The  adjustment 
of  these  factors  gives  more  than  one  center  of  beet  production 
to  each  of  the  four  states  of  California,  Colorado,  Idaho,  and 
Utah.  The  adaptation  of  the  beet  to  cool  climates  makes  it  im- 
portant in  Michigan  and  to  a  lesser  extent  in  Wisconsin  on  the 
glacial  areas  too  far  north  for  the  best  corn.  New  York  and 
Ohio  are  on  the  southern  margin  of  the  beet  region  and  have 
too  many  other  crops  for  the  farmers  of  any  one  locality  to  care 
to  contract  to  produce  the  hundreds  of  acres  of  beets  needed  to 
keep  a  factory  running  through  fall  and  winter  season  for  the 
many  years  necessary  if  it  is  to  be  profitable  to  the  owners. 


AMERICAN  SUGAR 


467 


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468  SUGAR 

CLIMATIC    REQUIREMENTS,    GROWTH,    AND    DISTRIBUTION    OF    SUGAR 

CANE 

The  battle  between  cane  and  beet  is  carried  on  at  long  range, 
with  far-flung  sugar  sacks,  the  plants  themselves  never  meeting 
leaf  to  leaf.  The  sugar  cane  is  as  distinctly  limited  to  warm 
climates  as  the  beet  is  to  cool  ones.  It  will  grow  on  the  edges 
of  the  temperate  zones  in  such  districts  as  Louisiana,  New 
Zealand,  Natal,  Cape  Colony,  and  Argentina.  It  has  been 
grown  at  32°  north  latitude  in  Spain  and  31°  south  in  New 
Zealand,  but  it  is  at  home  and  does  its  best  only  in  regions  free 
from  frost.  It  invades  the  frost  zone  only  where  there  is  a 
long  growing  season,  and  protection,  by  tariffs  and  bounties, 
from  tropic  competition.  The  best  crops  require  such  condi-. 
tions  as  exist  in  Cuba,  Java,  Brazil,  and  India,  where  there  is 
a  temperature  of  75  or  80  °F.  the  year  round  and  a  rainfall 
of  sixty  inches  or  its  equivalent  by  irrigation.  The  cane's  need 
of  much  sunshine  gives  irrigation  a  great  advantage,  and  a  large 
share  of  the  world's  cane  crop  is  irrigated  to  some  extent. 

Drought  hurts  cane,  first,  by  limiting  its  size,  and  second,  by 
making  the  joints  shorter,  increasing  the  amount  of  fiber  and 
decreasing  the  sugar  content  per  pound. 

Cane  does  not  require  such  careful  handwork  as  the  beet. 
It  is  cultivated  with  plows,  not  hoes;  by  men,  not  by  women 
and  children;  and  even  the  steam  plow  may  do  much  of  the 
work,  as  has  been  proved  in  the  British  island  of  Trinidad 
and  in  Hawaii.  The  method  of  planting  is  by  putting  cuttings 
in  the  ground,  or,  as  in  Louisiana  and  Cuba,  by  laying  in  the 
bottom  of  a  furrow  a  row  of  cane  stalks,  which  sprout  from 
every  joint.  After  eight  months  or  more  of  growth  and  culti- 
vation the  leaves  are  stripped  off,  and  the  stalks  are  cut  by  hand 
and  carried  away  to  the  factory.  The  transport  of  the  cane  to 
the  factory  is  a  serious  problem.  A  good  crop  amounts  to  fifteen 
or  twenty  tons  of  cane  per  acre  and  forty  is  sometimes  reached. 
The  fields  are  often  muddy  and  the  distance  to  the  factory  is 
increasing  as  factories  become  larger.  In  backward  countries, 
cane  is  sometimes  carried  on  mule  back,  but  in  the  great  ship- 
ping districts  carts  drawn  by  oxen  or  mules  are  used ;  the  best- 
equipped  sugar  plantations  have  portable  railway  tracks  placed 


THE  TROPIC  SUGAR  FACTORY        469 

in  the  fields  and  diminutive  plantation  locomotives  to  pull  the 
cane  cars.  Cane  sugar  resembles  beet  sugar  in  the  size  of  the 
factory  required  if  the  juice  is  to  be  economically  extracted  and 
the  by-products  disposed  of.  Several  thousand  acres  of  cane 
make  a  good  unit.  The  guaranteeing  of  this  amount  of  cane  year 
after  year  is  difficult  if  many  independent  tropic  farmers  must 
be  depended  upon  to  produce  it.  This  difficulty  tends  to  make 
the  sugar  company  grow  its  own  cane — an  undertaking  much 
easier  than  the  growing  of  beets  by  a  corporation  on  a  large 
scale.  For  generations  the  work  was  done  by  gangs  of 
negro  slaves  in  the  tropic  colonies  of  European  countries. 
Most  of  the  world's  commercial  crop  is  now  grown  on 
plantations  by  gangs  of  negroes  in  Louisiana,  mulattoes  and 
Spaniards  in  Cuba,  Malays  in  Java,  Chinese  and  Japanese  in 
Hawaii.  In  the  Argentine  province  of  Jujuy  one  of  the 
leading  plantations  of  that  country  employed  (1911)  5,16G 
workers  (of  whom  4,520  were  Indians  at  thirty  cents  per  day 
for  women,  and  forty  cents  per  day  for  men,  with  19  miles 
of  permanent  railway,  19  miles  of  temporary  railway,  600  cars, 
and  7  locomotives.  Cane  growing  needs  far  less  scientific  agri- 
culture than  beet  growing  requires.  Most  plantations  in  Cuba 
and  even  in  the  United  States  are  still  growing  the  crop  year 
after  year  on  the  same  ground  without  adequate  crop  rotation. 
As  this  state  of  affairs  cannot  continue  indefinitely,  crop  rota- 
tion will  be  established,  requiring  even  larger  area  and  increas- 
ing the  difficulty  of  carrying  the  cane  to  the  mills. 

THE   DISTRIBUTION   OP  CANE  GROWING 

The  adaptation  of  the  sugar  cane  to  practically  all  moist  low- 
lands lying  between  Louisiana  and  Argentina  in  the  New  World 
and  between  southern  Italy  and  India,  Natal  and  New  South 
Wales  in  the  Old  World,  provides  an  easy  source  of  sugar  for  all 
tropic  peoples.  Cane  growing  is  a  local  industry  in  practically 
all  these  countries.  The  children,  partly  or  entirely  naked,  walk 
about  sucking  a  stick  of  raw  cane,  a  substitute  for  our  stick  of 
candy  and  often  more  wholesome,  because  unadulterated.  Al- 
though the  crop  is  widely  grown  throughout  the  tropics,  only  a 
few  of  these  many  countries  export  sugar,  because,  while  a  crude 


470  SUGAR 

ox-driven  mill  with  three  rolls  will  suffice  to  crush  the  cane  for 
local  use,  it  cannot  compete  in  the  world  market.  In  India,  for 
example,  it  is  estimated  that  there  is  an  annual  production  of 
two  and  one-half  million  acres,  an  area  greater  than  that  of  any 
other  country;  but  this  crop  does  not  enter  into  foreign  com- 
merce because  it  is  all  consumed  locally,  and  the  import  is  in- 
creasing. Much  of  the  Indian  crop  is  grown  under  irrigation 
in  the  moist  valley  of  the  Ganges  and  it  is  often  eaten  raw 
(unrefined). 

Sugar  cane  is  grown  in  the  lowlands  of  Mexico  and  of  each 
of  the  Central  American  countries,  and  also  in  every  South 
American  country  except  Chile.  But  throughout  much  of  this 
region  the  process  of  manufacture  is  crude,  the  conditions  of 
transportation,  of  labor,  of  capital,  and  of  political  stability  are 
unsuitable  for  the  development  of  a  large  cane-sugar  export, 
although  there  are  in  tropic  America  large  areas  of  excellent 
cane  land,  especially  on  the  shores  where  the  trade  wind  blows. 
The  lowlands  of  the  Gulf  and  Caribbean  coast  of  Mexico,  Central 
America,  and  northern  South  America  are  excellent  examples  of 
such  lands. 

The  export  supply  of  cane  sugar  comes  only  from  especially 
rich  plains  near  tropical  shores,  favored  by  fairly  stable  govern- 
ment, such  as  Cuba,  Java,  the  Philippines,  Hawaii,  and  Brazil. 
At  no  place  is  cane  sugar  grown  for  export  in  locations  distant 
from  the  seashore  and  from  ocean  transportation.  Naturally 
with  such  a  wealth  of  opportunity  man  will  use  the  best  first. 


SOUTH   AMERICAN   SUGAR 

In  South  America  three  countries  export  sugar,  each  produc- 
ing under  distinctly  different  conditions. 

The  British  colony  of  Guiana  on  the  northeastern  coast  of 
South  America  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  of  cane  lands, 
showing  intensive  cultivation  and  the  untouched  wilderness  side 
by  side.  Large  areas  of  coast  swamp  have  been  reclaimed  from 
the  sea  along  the  north  shore  by  the  same  methods  as  those  used 
by  the  Dutch  (the  original  settlers  of  Guiana)  in  reclaiming 
Holland.  This  reclamation  is  the  more  unusual  because  most 
of  the  country  remains  a  great  forest  absolutely  uninhabited, 


SOUTH  AMERICAN  SUGAR  471 

save  for  a  few  uncounted  savages.  The  explanation  of  this 
unused  land  is  to  be  found  in  the  climate,  which  is  so  ill  suited 
to  white  colonists  that  they  number  but  five  per  cent,  of  the  total 
population  and  merely  occupy  positions  under  the  government 
or  in  the  management  of  stores,  plantations,  and  other  enter- 
prises. In  the  attempt  to  people  this  fertile  desert  and  work 
the  productive  lands,  the  government  has  permitted  the  recent 
importation  of  thousands  of  East  Indian  coolies  accustomed  to 
growing  rice  and  sugar  cane.  The  reclaimed  swamp  land  is  very 
fertile,  has  a  large  rainfall,  and,  like  the  flat  and  level  dike  lands, 
is  easily  irrigated.  Furthermore,  the  drainage  ditches  serve  as 
canals  for  the  boats  that  carry  the  cane  from  field  to  factory. 

In  contrast  to  the  capitalistic  and  highly  scientific  sugar  in- 
dustry of  Guiana,  Brazil  has  a  sugar  industry  whose  methods 
have  not  changed  in  a  century.  There  is  a  small  sugar  export 
along  eighteen  hundred  miles  of  coast  in  the  central  regions  in 
that  country,  but  for  years  it  declined  with  the  decline  of 
price  due  to  beet  competition.  During  the  war  scarcity  Brazil 
increased  her  production,  probably  only  temporarily.  Sugar 
can  be  more  easily  produced  in  the  more  thoroughly  established 
export  regions  where  the  government  is  controlled  from  north 
of  the  tropic  of  Cancer. 

Peru  is  the  third  South  American  sugar  exporter.  In  that 
country,  the  sugar  plantations  are  located  in  the  fertile  rainless 
coast  desert  from  which  the  high  Andes  cut  off  the  moisture- 
laden  east  winds  from  the  Atlantic.  A  few  streams  fed  by  the 
Andean  snows  and  flowing  down  to  the  Pacific  save  this  Peru- 
vian plain  from  a  condition  of  hopeless  barrenness.  There  is 
sufficient  water  to  irrigate  parts  of  the  valleys,  and  to  make 
possible  a  luxuriant  growth  of  cane,  which,  together  with  alfalfa 
fields,  orchards,  and  gardens,  makes  a  strong  color  contrast  to 
the  brown  desert  beyond  the  last  irrigation  ditch.  The  yield  per 
acre  is  good,  because  of  the  proper  amount  of  sunshine,  and 
water  afforded  by  irrigation,  but  there  is  small  room  for  the 
extension  of  Peruvian  production. 

Argentina  has  an  isolated  cane-sugar  region  in  the  sub-tropic 
province  of  Tucuman,  latitude  28°  south.  The  production  per 
acre  is  rather  low,  and  the  total  production  is  not  sufficient  for 
the  national  supply. 


472  SUGAR 

SUGAR  IN  THE  WEST   INDIES 

The  history  and  description  of  sugar  growing  in  the  West 
Indian  Islands  is  an  interesting  chapter  in  economic  history. 
In  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  these  islands  were 
much  prized  by  the  colony-owning  powers  of  Europe,  and  were 
the  center  of  the  world's  sugar  production.  At  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century  they  had  a  high  degree  of  prosperity,  based 
on  plantations  owned  by  Europeans,  worked  by  African  slaves, 
and  largely  given  over  to  the  growth  of  export  sugar  and  rum, 
distilled,  then  as  now,  from  the  cane  juice. 

The  emancipation  of  the  slaves  allowed  leisure  to  replace  labor 
and  brought  decline  in  the  sugar  crop  of  many  of  the  West 
Indian  Islands,  but  in  none  so  much  as  Hayti,  where  political 
chaos  succeeded  French  rule  and  the  jungle  is  crowding  more 
and  more  into  the  abandoned  sugar  fields.  Latterly,  the  sugar 
growers  of  the  West  Indies,  particularly  of  the  British  West 
Indies,  have  had  to  meet  the  severe  competition  of  European 
beet  sugar,  which  has  further  depressed  the  prosperity  of  the 
sugar  colonies.  Sugar  is,  however,  an  important  export  from 
Trinidad  and  Barbados.  The  discontent  of  British  West  Indian 
colonies,  some  of  which  desired  to  become  possessions  of  the 
United  States  in  order  to  have  their  sugar  imported  free  into 
the  United  States,  was  one  of  the  reasons  leading  up  to  the 
British  action  that  resulted  in  the  Brussels  sugar  conference  of 
1903. 

The  advantage  of  free  admission  of  sugar  into  the  United 
States  (with  high  prices  to  growers)  is  well  shown  in  Porto  Rico. 
In  ten  years  after  its  annexation  to  the  United  States  the  export 
crop  of  an  island  less  than  half  as  large  as  New  Jersey  increased 
from  50,000  to  250,000  tons,  and  the  value  of  the  export  increased 
from  $2,500,000  to  $19,000,000.  In  the  second  decade  of  the  free 
admission  of  Porto  Rico  sugar,  the  crop  increased  from  250,000 
to  500,000  tons  (1917).  The  sugar  is  grown  on  the  coast  low- 
lands and  the  increase  has  come  about  largely  through  the  con- 
solidation of  many  small  plantations  and  the  modernizing  of  fac- 
tories by  American  capital.  The  rainfall  on  the  windward  north- 
eastern side  is  sufficient  for  the  crop,  but  on  the  drier  south- 
western side  the  cane  fields  are  irrigated.  The  same  process  of 


BARBADOS  AND  SUGAR  473 

capitalistic  consolidation  is  in  progress  in  the  British  West 
Indies,  in  some  of  which,  as  in  Barbados,  the  industry  has  sur- 
vived from  colonial  periods  in  a  rather  primitive  condition. 

In  addition  to  its  part  in  the  sugar  industry  the  island  of 
Barbados  is  interesting  as  an  example  of  the  way  man  supports 
himself  upon  the  earth.  This  island  of  166  square  miles  has 
nearly  1,200  people  to  the  square  mile.  Sixty  per  cent,  of  the 
area  of  the  island  is  in  sugar,  which  is  allowed  to  stand  three 
years  and  is  then  followed  by  cotton,  corn,  or  potatoes.  Laborers 
at  farm  work  earn  thirty  to  forty  cents  per  day  and  the  women 
half  as  much.  "Field  work  is  all  done  by  hand.  Sugar  lands 
are  cleared  by  hand  labor  and  put  in  condition  for  the  next  crop 
with  spade  and  fork.  I  saw  very  few,  not  over  five  plows  during 
a  forty-mile  drive."  * 

There  is  a  strong  contrast  between  this  small-scale,  semi- 
Oriental  industry  of  Barbados  and  the  scientific  and  large-scale 
operations  of  Cuba  and  Hawaii. 

CUBA 

Cuba  is,  next  to  India,  the  greatest  cane-sugar  producer  in  the 
world,  yielding  at  times  one-fourth  of  the  total  produce,  and 
leading  all  other  lands  in  the  amount  exported.  About  half  of 
all  the  cultivated  land  in  Cuba  is  in  cane  fields.  Normally  the 
island  was  producing  during  the  last  decade  of  the  nineteenth 
and  first  decade  of  the  twentieth  century  about  1,100,000  tons 
per  year,  but  the  war  with  Spain  reduced  this  amount  in  1896 
to  less  than  one-fourth  and  destroyed  seven-eighths  of  the  sugar 
mills.  Under  the  stable  government  that  followed  independence, 
Cuba  recovered  its  normal  position  by  1903,  and  has  since  taken 
a  higher  position  than  ever  in  the  world's  sugar  market, 
the  crop  of  1910-11  being  1,900,000  tons;  that  of  1916-17, 
2,900,000. 

Cuban  sugar  plantations,  most  of  them  owned  by  Europeans 
or  Americans,  are  usually  of  large  extent.  The  use  of  planta- 
tion railroads  with  locomotives  to  haul  the  cane  to  large  fac- 
tories is  quite  common.  The  plantations  are  being  enlarged  and 
improved  machinery  is  being  installed  to  reduce  costs,  since  labor 

•United  States  Commerce  Report,  October  3,  1911. 


474  SUGAR 

is  scarce  and  its  cost  is  rising  and  the  price  of  sugar  on  the 
whole  declining.  The  pre-war  price  of  two  and  one-fourth  cents 
per  pound  at  plantation  left  some  profit. 

Cuba  has  been  able  to  produce  such  great  quantities  of  sugar 
because  she  has  had  a  fairly  stable  government,  a  population 
economically  superior  (more  nearly  white)  to  that  of  most  tropic 
countries,  and  an  abundance  of  good,  rich,  well-drained  sugar 
land.  Only  one-fourteenth  of  the  sugar  land  is  now  in  use, 
so  that  the  industry  can  still  be  very  unscientific.  When  land  has 
been  exhausted  the  industry  has  been  able  to  move,  generally 
to  the  eastward  from  Havana  where  the  industry  had  its  first 
center.  The  increasing  scarcity  of  labor  sets  the  limit  of  Cuban 
sugar  growing. 

HAWAII 

The  Hawaiian  Islands,  with  a  total  area  nearly  as  great  as  that 
of  Massachusetts,  are  second  only  to  Cuba  as  a  source  of  sugar 
imported  for  the  American  market.  The  sugar  yield  per  acre 
is  the  largest  in  the  world,  due  first  to  the  virgin  fertility  of  the 
phenomenal  soil,  decayed  lava  from  the  great  Hawaiian  vol- 
canoes. Some  of  it  has  been  further  prepared  by  nature  for 
sugar  by  having  once  been  submerged  long  enough  to  get  a  good 
admixture  of  coral  limestone — soil  of  soils!  Fine  yields  are 
further  guaranteed  by  heavy  use  of  commercial  fertilizers  and 
by  irrigation  on  the  leeward  sides  of  the  islands.  In  the  absence 
of  suitable  rivers  at  the  right  elevation  for  stream  diversion  the 
water  is  gathered  near  the  sea  level  from  streams  and  wells  and 
pumped  up,  sometimes  hundreds  of  feet,  through  iron  pipes  and 
spread  over  the  fertile  lava  slopes,  making  some  of  the  most 
spectacular  plantations  in  the  world.  The  tractor  is  in  general 
use  for  plowing  the  sugar  lands.  Hawaiian  crops  have  averaged 
over  nine  thousand  pounds  of  sugar  to  the  acre,  twice  the  harvest 
of  West  Indies,  and  these  latter  islands  in  turn  yield  better 
than  cane  fields  upon  the  rich  delta  of  the  Mississippi,  where  the 
climate  is  too  cool  for  the  best  growth  of  cane. 

Hawaii  has  had  the  special  privilege  of  receiving  a  higher 
price  than  any  other  sugar  exporter  except  Porto  Rico.  This 
high  price  was  due,  before  the  islands  were  annexed  in  1898,  to 


HAWAII  AND  JAVA  475 

the  reciprocity  treaty  of  1876,  admitting  Hawaiian  sugar  to  the 
United  States  without  the  payment  of  duty.  The  11,000  tons 
produced  in  1875  grew  to  250,000  in  1899;  506,000  in  1911; 
644,000  in  1917.  Since  annexation  the  export  goes  free  of  duty 
to  the  United  States,  which  naturally  gets  it  all. 

This  special  privilege  to  the  sugar  growers  of  Hawaii  has  led 
to  high  profits  and  the  suppression  of  other  industries  in  the 
islands.  These  profits  began  when  the  islands  had  a  few  thrifty 
white  people  and  many  easy-going  natives,  giving  an  admirable 
opportunity  for  the  formation  of  great  estates  which  loudf 
called  for  workers.  These  came  from  China  until  the  Chinese 
exclusion  treaty  shut  them  out  in  1898.  Then  came  Japa- 
nese until  the  Japanese  Government  checked  their  emigration 
to  the  islands.  Then  came  laborers  from  the  Philippines, 
Portugal,  and  Russia,  to  grow  the  sugar  on  a  few  vast  estates. 
One  company  reports  harvesting  6,448  acres  yielding  56,865 
tons  of  sugar,  an  average  yield  of  8.76  tons  of  sugar  per  acre. 
It  took  only  6.89  tons  of  cane  to  make  a  ton  of  sugar.  This 
cane  is  exceptionally  rich,  and  the  yield  phenomenally  large, 
as  were  the  plantation  profits  of  $2,261,000  in  a  year. 

THE    ADVANCED    DEVELOPMENT    IN    JAPANESE    SUGAR   GROWING 

Java,  an  island  about  the  size  of  New  York,  is  very  remark- 
able in  the  world's  commercial  geography.  Forty  per  cent,  of 
the  land  is  cultivated.  It  supports  a  population  of  thirty  mil- 
lion who  have  food  products  for  export,  and  yet  parts  of  the 
country  are  sufficiently  wild  to  shelter  the  wild  elephant  and 
the  rhinoceros.  The  cultivated  areas  have  the  great  advantage 
of  being  alluvial  plains  made  of  rich  volcanic  mud  where  a  fair 
rainfall  can  be  improved  by  supplemental  irrigation — agricul- 
tural conditions  that  are  very  hard  to  equal  and  cannot  be 
surpassed.  The  chief  export  is  cane  sugar,  of  which  Java  fur- 
nishes about  one-fifth  of  the  world's  crop,  being  second  only  to 
India  and  Cuba.  In  sparsely  peopled  countries  like  Cuba,  sugar 
can  often  be  grown  on  newly  cleared  land,  and  as  the  cane  will 
live  for  many  years  with  an  annual  cutting,  new  sugar  lands 
are  often  made  to  give  six  or  eight  or  ten  crops  before  replanting. 
In  Java,  the  larger  area  under  cultivation  makes  it  impossible  to 


476  SUGAR 

keep  moving  to  new  land ;  hence,  this  island  has  the  most  scien- 
tific agriculture  to  be  found  in  any  cane-growing  region. 

Since  the  first  cutting  of  canes,  following  the  plowing  and 
planting,  is  always  the  best,  a  field  in  Java  is  allowed  to  yield 
only  one  crop ;  the  same  restriction  applies  in  Louisiana  because 
of  frost.  Sugar  is  followed  the  next  year  by  beans,  then  by  corn, 
then  rice,  then  sugar  again.  Under  this  systematic  cultivation 
and  a  complex  system  of  governmental  control  which  at  times 
amounts  almost  to  compulsory  labor,  the  sugar  output  increased 
t||reefold  in  the  twenty  years  following  1884.  When  the  Cuban 
supply  was  temporarily  stopped  by  the  devastation  accompany- 
ing the  war  of  1895-98,  Java  played  an  important  part  in  supply- 
ing the  United  States,  sending  to  her  in  1899  as  much  as  seventy- 
one  per  cent,  of  the  crop.  This  meant  that  every  second  day 
throughout  the  year,  a  tramp  steamship  skirted  the  coast  of  Java, 
loading  600-pound  bamboo  baskets  of  sugar  for  the  American 
consumer,  10,000  miles  away.  Just  before  the  Great  War  we 
were  using  400,000  tons  of  Java  sugar  every  year,  but  in  the 
spring  of  1918  it  was  reported  that  900,000  tons  of  Javanese 
sugar  were  piled  up  waiting  for  the  ships  that  did  not  come. 
After  the  United  States,  China  is  Java's  best  customer  in  times 
of  peace.  The  rest  of  the  sugar  goes  to  Japan,  India,  Australia, 
and  other  Eastern  countries,  practically  none  of  it  going  to  the 
mother  country,  Holland,  nor  to  any  other  part  of  Europe, 
because  of  the  beet  supply  there. 

The  Philippine  Islands  have  admirable  soil,  temperature,  and 
rainfall  for  the  growth  of  sugar.  The  sugar  resources  are  much 
greater  than  those  of  Java,  which  is  but  a  third  as  large ;  but  the 
population  is  eight  million  instead  of  thirty,  there  is  no  Dutch 
Government  with  a  system  of  compulsory  labor,  the  industrious 
Chinese  are  excluded,  the  high  price  of  hemp  and  copra  have 
given  other  outlets  for"  enterprise,  and  the  United  States  has 
taxed  the  sugar  when  it  reached  the  United  States.  The  result 
is  a  sugar  industry  only  a  third  larger  than  the  output  when  the 
islands  were  a  Spanish  colony,  and  not  so  large  as  the  production 
in  Porto  Rico.  The  methods  of  extraction  and  manufacture  have 
always  been  wasteful,  but  improvement  is  expected  as  a  result 
of  a  campaign  of  agricultural  education  now  in  progress  in  that 
archipelago. 


AMERICA'S  POOR  CANE  CROP  477 

MAURITIUS,  REUNION,   AND   EGYPT 

Sugar  is  the  predominating  export  from  the  two  tropic  islands 
of  Mauritius  (British,  713  square  miles)  and  Reunion  (French, 
970  square  miles)  in  the  Indian  Ocean  near  Madagascar.  They 
have  a  combined  population  of  over  half  a  million,  of  whom  a 
large  part  are  industrious  coolies  brought  from  India  and  China, 
so  that  these  small  lands  play  a  comparatively  large  role  in 
sugar  commerce,  exporting  nearly  all  of  their  quarter  of  a 
million  ton  crop. 

Egypt  has  excellent  resources  of  soil,  sunshine,  and  irrigation 
water  for  sugar,  but  she  plays  an  unimportant  role  in  this  com- 
merce because  her  population  of  930  per  square  mile  demands 
rice,  corn,  and  beans,  crops  whose  acreage  far  exceeds  the  sugar 
acreage. 

THE  SUPPLY  AND  PRODUCTION  OP  SUGAR  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES 

The  United  States,  with  a  sugar  consumption  of  over  four 
million  tons,  has  been  growing  cane  sugar  for  a  century,  and 
beet  sugar  since  1890;  yet  the  import  increases  year  after  year, 
despite  the  fact  that  the  home  product  has  trebled  within  twenty 
years.  Despite  rapid  increase  of  production  during  the  war, 
and  supposed  efforts  to  minimize  consumption,  the  United  States 
reached  its  greatest  import  of  3,900,000  tons  in  1916,  and  im- 
ported only  100,000  tons  less  in  1917. 

Home-grown  cane  sugar  has  had  small  chance  of  supplying  the 
huge  home  demand  because  the  areas  suitable  for  cane  growing 
are  limited,  and  inferior  to  those  of  tropic  districts.  The  superi- 
ority of  the  tropics  lies  in  climate  rather  than  in  soil.  In  the 
frost-free  climate  there  are  records  of  fifty  yearly  cuttings  from 
one  planting,  and  in  parts  of  Porto  Rico  cane  has  lived  and 
been  cut  for  twenty  years,  while  on  the  Cuban  plantations  eight 
or  ten  crops  are  regularly  cut  from  one  planting.  Louisiana 
must  plant  annually  four  tons  to  the  acre.  The  average  yield 
is  fifteen  tons  per  acre;  the  yield  of  Hawaii  is  forty-two  tons, 
and  that  of  Java  is  about  forty  tons.  The  tropic  crop  has  twelve 
full  months  for  growth,  more  if  need  be ;  while  that  of  Louisiana 
has  but  eight,  so  that  American  cane  yields  but  120  to  150  pounds 


478  SUGAR 

of  sugar  per  ton,  while  the  cane  of  Cuba  and  Java  yields  from 
200  to  225  pounds  per  ton.  The  Louisiana  crop  suffers  the  dis- 
advantage of  expensive  labor  of  planting,  occasional  injury  from 
frost  and  sometimes  heavy  December  rains  which  may  ferment 
the  crop  and  cause  the  loss  of  millions  of  dollars  in  a  few  days. 
These  factors  combine  to  make  our  cane-sugar  industry  one 
which,  like  our  beet-sugar  industry,  could  not  survive  without 
the  high  price  produced  by  a  protective  tariff.  Despite  the 


FIG.  125. — Planting  sugar  cane  in  Louisiana.  The  rows  are  curved 
to  keep  them  horizontal  and  prevent  washing,  a  lesson  that  the  North 
has  strangely  failed  to  learn  from  the  South.  (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 


stimulus  of  war  conditions  our  cane  crop  remained  stationary 
from  1913  to  1917. 

Owing  to  these  climatic  limitations  cane-sugar  production, 
even  with  tariff  aid,  attains  importance  only  in  the  southern 
third  of  Louisiana,  a  coast  strip  in  eastern  Texas,  and  a  few 
localities  in  Florida.  The  sugar  territory  of  southern  Louisiana 
is  part  of  the  rich  and  swampy  flood  plain  of  the  Mississippi 
River.  The  only  tillable  land  is  within  a  mile  or  two  of  the 
Mississippi,  or  other  streams,  where  the  deposits  of  the  over- 
flowing streams  have  built  up  a  little  land  a  few  feet  above  the 
general  swamp  level.  In  two  of  the  parishes  (counties)  of 
Louisiana  (St.  Mary  and  Terrebonne),  over  half  of  the  culti- 


BEET  AND  CANE  COMPETE 


479 


vated  area,  and  in  seven  other  counties  over  twenty-five  per 
cent.,  was  recently  in  sugar. 

The  limitation  on  production  is  not  set  by  lack  of  suitable 
land;  for  it  is  reported  that  we  have  ten  million  acres  of  good 


Tons 

i 

800.000 
760.000 
700.000 
660.000 
600.000 
660.000 
600.000 
460.000 
400.000 
860.000 
800.000 
260.000 
200.000 
160.000 
100.000 
60.000 

0 

i 
i 

i 
i 

\ 

__ 

-  Cane  Sugar 
-  Beet  Sugar 

i 

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'r                                                                             8                                                                              o>    *"                                            5 

Fio.  126. — Production  of  cane  and  beet  sugar  in  the  United  States. 

cane  land  and  now  cultivate  one-twenty-fifth  of  it.  It  should 
be  kept  in  mind  that  this  same  land,  when  drained,  Is  good  with- 
out handicap  for  rice,  cotton,  or  corn,  and  many  forage  plants 
for  meat  production.  The  American  cane-sugar  growers  have 
always  had  to  combat  scarcity  of  labor  as  well  as  troubles  of 
climate,  and  above  all  the  uncertainties  of  the  tariff. 

The  extraction  of  cane  molasses  for  local  use  is  a  simple  process 


480  SUGAR 

rather  widely  distributed  in  the  South,  and  a  little  cane  is  grown 
for  this  purpose  as  far  north  as  Arkansas  and  Eastern  North 
Carolina. 


CANE  SUGAR  AS  A  LOCAL  SUPPLY  CROP 

Beet  sugar  is  only  edible  after  it  has  been  through  the 
machinery  of  a  great  refinery.  In  contrast  to  beet  sugar,  cane 
juice  is  a  prized  article  of  food  in  all  stages  of  manufacture, 
even  when  sucked  directly  from  the  cane  itself.  Living  and 
yielding  for  years  beside  the  native's  palm-leaf  hut,  the  cane 
patch  furnishes  a  pleasing  element  in  that  complete  support 
which  the  tropic  climate  yields  to  man  with  little  labor  on  his 
part.  Crushed  by  ox  or  man  power  between  rude  rollers  and 
boiled  in  the  family  kettle,  it  provides  a  cheaper  sugar  supply 
than  the  grocery  store  yields  in  the  land  of  frost. 

The  cane  is  an  important  and  widely  distributed  source  of 
food  throughout  the  thousands  of  Polynesian  islands  from  Aus- 
tralia to  Singapore,  and  thence  to  Hawaii,  six  thousand  miles 
to  the  eastward.  In  the  Fiji  Islands,  as  in  Java,  there  is  an 
important  cane-sugar  industry,  producing  here  under  British 
management  about  one-fifth  as  much  cane  sugar  as  the  crop  of 
the  United  States.  The  chief  market  for  this  sugar  is  the  neigh- 
boring island  of  New  Zealand.  In  the  warmer  part  of  Aus- 
tralia there  is  a  very  large  area  of  admirable  cane  land,  espe- 
cially in  Queensland,  but  the  population  is  less  than  one  a  square 
mile,  and  the  strenuous  desire  of  the  Australian  commonwealth 
to  remain  a  white  man's  land  has  caused  the  enactment  of  laws 
prohibiting  the  admission  of  the  colored  laborers  (Hindoo,  Negro, 
Chinese,  or  South  Sea  Islanders)  on  whom  the  planter  depends. 
As  white  laborers  will  not  go  to  the  tropics,  the  Queensland  sugar 
output  is  not  increasing ;  that  of  New  South  Wales  is  small,  and 
suffers  from  the  same  handicaps  that  interfere  with  cane  growing 
in  Louisiana. 

THE   BY-PRODUCTS   OF   SUGAR  MAKING 

The  mill  that  suffices  for  making  the  sugar  and  molasses  for 
local  use  in  the  interior  of  Venezuela,  Guatemala,  or  India,  may 


THE  MODERN  FACTORY  481 

have  two  or  three  small  rollers  turned  by  oxen,  getting  fifty  or 
at  most  seventy-five  per  cent,  of  the  juice.  This  is  boiled  in 
open  vats,  a  primitive  method  which  leaves  much  of  the  sugar 
in  the  form  of  molasses ;  however,  the  molasses  is  one  of  five  great 
staples  in  the  nourishment  of  the  masses  in  tropic  America. 
(The  others  are  corn  cakes,  cassava,  bananas,  and  beans.)  In 
great  commercial  sugar  plants,  however,  enormous  rollers  with 
a  pressure  of  many  tons  are  driven  by  steam,  ninety  per  cent, 
of  the  juice  is  extracted,  and  a  washing  of  the  crushed  cane 
extracts  an  additional  five  per  cent.  The  juice  is  evaporated 
in  vacuum  pans,  which  save  more  sugar  and  require  much  less 
skill  than  the  primitive  method,  because  evaporation  takes  place 
in  the  vacuum  at  so  much  lower  temperature  that  there  is  less 
danger  of  burning  the  sugar.  The  molasses  that  comes  from 
the  more  scientific  process  has  so  little  sugar  left  that  it  is  not 
fit  for  human  food  nor  even  for  the  distillation  of  rum.  Thus 
these  two  classic  staples  of  trade,  which  have  for  centuries  been 
the  great  by-product  of  the  sugar  plantations  of  the  West  Indies, 
are  now  made  only  by  a  cast-off  process  used  in  the  less  efficient 
plants  of  small  plantations  or  backward  sugar  regions. 

The  tasteless  molasses  of  the  modern  plant  is  fit  only  for  the 
distillation  of  industrial  alcohol  and  the  preparation  of  a  cattle 
food  which,  under  the  name  of  molassquite,  has  of  late  become 
of  increased  importance.  Molassquite  is  made  by  absorbing  the 
sugar  of  the  molasses  in  the  spongy  pulp  that  comes  from  the 
heart  of  the  cane.  Since  only  one-fourteenth  of  the  possible 
sugar  area  of  Cuba  is  in  use  and  only  one-thirtieth  of  the  island 
is  under  cultivation,  there  is  the  possibility  of  an  important  trade 
with  the  countries  of  the  temperate  zone  where  livestock  is  raised. 
Owing  to  the  rising  price  of  cattle  foods,  wheat  bran  and  corn 
are  now  nearly  as  expensive  as  cane  sugar,  which  is  as  nutritious 
and  as  acceptable  to  the  ruminants  as  to  man.  Ten  pounds  of 
mill  (blackstrap)  molasses,  with  the  addition  of  two  pounds  of 
cottonseed  meal,  make  a  stock  food  almost  the  exact  equivalent 
of  ten  pounds  of  corn. 

There  is  no  reason  why  we  may  not  in  the  near  future  have 
a  very  important  commerce  in  sugar  and  sugar  by-products  with 
the  tropic  countries,  which  will  help  to  make  cheaper  meat,  milk, 
and  wool  in  the  countries  of  the  temperate  zone. 


482  SUGAR 

A  recent  improvement  permits  the  bagasse  or  crushed  cane  to 
pass  directly  from  the  crusher  to  the  furnace.  The  labor  of 
spreading  it  out  to  dry  in  the  sun,  as  was  done  for  a  century, 
is  thus  avoided. 


THE   FUTURE   OF   CANE-SUGAR   INDUSTRY 

The  growing  of  any  large  amounts  of  sugar  outside  the  tropics 
has  only  succeeded  where  governments  have  shielded  the  in- 
dustry from  competition  with  the  tropic  cane.  If  the  time 
should  come  when  we  desire  the  increased  wealth  of  free  trade, 
or  when  the  pressure  of  temperate-zone  population  on  land 
resources  makes  us  need  our  sugar  lands  for  other  crops,  an 
indefinite  amount  of  tropic  land  is  ready  to  grow  sugar  for 
our  supply.  It  is  in  favor  of  cane  sugar  that  science  has  not 
been  so  fully  applied  to  it  as  to  beet  sugar.  The  latter  industry 
was  started  in  scientific  Germany;  the  former  has  always  been 
in  far-away  colonies  of  countries  where  science  was  not  held 
in  high  esteem.  The  cane  has  never  been  an  important  crop 
in  the  home  land  of  any  first-rate  power  nor  in  the  land  of 
a  highly  educated  people.  Much  improvement  appears  to  be 
possible  in  cane-sugar  production  in  suitable  localities. 

A  striking  and  perhaps  revolutionary  example  of  this  im- 
provement comes  from  Hawaii,  where  there  has  been  established 
a  new  practice  in  sugar-cane  growing  which  promises  greatly  to 
reduce  the  cost  and  to  put  cane  still  further  ahead  of  the  beet. 
Weeds  spring  up  in  the  tropic  soil  literally  over  night.  To  dig 
them  out  of  the  rows  of  young  cane  plants  is  laborious  and 
expensive.  Mr.  F.  E.  Echart,  an  employee  of  a  Hawaiian  sugar 
company,  observed  that  the  cane  shoots  emerge  tightly  rolled  up, 
and  sharp  pointed  like  a  pencil.  He  found  that  this  point 
would  penetrate  paper  laid  flat  on  the  ground.  By  impreg- 
nating the  paper  with  asphalt  and  holding  it  down  with  bamboo 
pegs,  stones,  dirt,  etc.,  it  was  found  that  the  young  sugar  shoots 
came  through,  though  the  soft-topped  weeds  could  not.  The 
paper  caused  an  increase  of  from  3  to  5°  F.  in  the  temperature, 
and  so  increased  the  moisture  that  the  cane  grew  at  abnormal 
speed  while  the  weed  sprouts  smothered  in  the  darkness.  By  the 
time  the  paper  had  disintegrated,  the  cane  plants  were  big 


MAPLE  SUGAR  483 

enough  to  shade  the  ground  and  take  care  of  themselves.  This 
expedient  brought  a  reduction  of  from  fifty  to  seventy  per  cent, 
in  the  labor  requirements  and,  because  of  the  greater  heat  and 
humidity  and  the  lessened  growth  of  weeds,  an  increase  of  some 
ten  tons  or  more  of  cane  per  acre.  The  plantation  at  once  pro- 
ceeded to  erect  as  part  of  its  equipment  a  paper  mill  to  make 
paper  out  of  bagasse,  the  refuse  of  the  cane  stalks  after  crushing. 
By  this  means  a  fifty  per  cent,  saving  in  the  price  of  paper  is 
effected,  as  well  as  the  complete  utilization  of  the  bagasse,  a  part 
of  which  had  previously  been  used  as  fuel  in  the  power  plants 
of  the  sugar  refinery.* 

It  is  easy  to  imagine  strips  of  paper,  miles  in  length,  spread 
out  across  the  great  valleys  of  the  Congo  or  the  Amazon,  or 
many  a  smaller  tropic  river,  with  stalks  of  sugar  cane  shooting 
through  them.  The  sugar,  perhaps,  may  furnish  alcohol  to  drive 
our  motor  cars  and  tractors  after  we  have  had  all  the  sugar  we 
want  to  eat,  and  gasoline  has  become  scarce. 

The  present  acreages  of  cane  sugar  are  insignificant  in  com- 
parison with  the  resources.  Java  and  Cuba  each  have  a  million 
and  a  third  acres,  or  roughly,  2,000  square  miles  each.  Hawaii 
has  but  250  square  miles,  merely  a  few  little  corners.  The  cane- 
sugar  supply  may  be  increased  by  other  means : 

1.  PLANT  BREEDING.    Recently  while  the  average  sugar  con- 
tent of  the  Porto  Rican  crop  was  eleven  per  cent.,  new  hybrid 
varieties  at  the  Porto  Rican  experiment  station  were  yielding 
twenty-one  per  cent,  of  sugar. 

2.  FERTILIZER.     Cane  demands  fertilizer,  especially  nitroge- 
nous fertilizer.    Our  air  nitrate  plants  are  now  unlocking  a  ni- 
trate supply  that  may  perhaps  be  limited  only  by  our  needs  or  the 
limited  supplies  of  power,  if  they  have  any  limits.    (See  Chapter 
XXVI.) 

MAPLE  SUGAR 

Maple  sugar  is  produced  by  the  evaporation  of  the  sweet  sap 
of  several  varieties  of  maple,  which  grow  over  large  areas  of 
eastern  and  northern  United  States.  The  sugar  was  a  very 
important  factor  in  the  life  of  colonial  days.  The  process  of 

*  Scientific  American,  April  20,  1918. 


484  SUGAR 

manufacture  suits  the  frontiersman.  A  small  hole  is  bored  about 
an  inch  into  the  trunk  of  the  tree  when  the  sap  is  flowing  in  the 
first  days  of  spring.  The  sap  flows  out  through  a  tube  into 
buckets,  is  carried  to  camps  in  the  woods,  boiled  in  large  open 
kettles  or  pans  until  the  proper  degree  of  thickness  is  reached, 
then  poured  into  molds  and  crystallized  into  the  delicious  maple 
sugar.  Some  of  the  product  is  sold  in  a  more  dilute  form  as 
maple  syrup.  This  kind  of  sugar  costs  more  than  either  beet 
or  cane  sugar  and  would  have  no  place  in  the  world  market 
but  for  its  fine  flavor,  for  which  it  commands  a  higher  price. 
The  sap  flows  in  quantities  sufficient  for  satisfactory  sugar  mak- 
ing only  when  the  days  are  bright  and  sunny  and  the  nights  are 
frosty.  This  climatic  factor  limits  sugar  orchards  to-  the  region 
east  and  north  of  Indiana.  The  industry  is  particularly  im- 
portant in  the  White  Mountain  region  of  Vermont  and  New 
Hampshire  and  the  adjacent  parts  of  Canada. 

The  sugar  maple  tree,  which  yields  from  the  time  it  is  twenty 
or  twenty-five  years  old  till  it  is  seventy-five  or  a  hundred  and 
is  then  a  valuable  wood,  is  certainly  a  more  permanent  sugar 
producer  than  any  other ;  but  the  yield  is  at  present  low.  There 
is  no  reason  why  the  amount  of  sugar  contained  in  the  sugar 
maple  might  not  be  greatly  increased,  as  the  productivity  of  the 
sugar  beet  and  the  sugar  cane  has  already  been  improved.  Of 
course,  the  process  would  be  slow,  but  the  results  would  be  large 
and  the  plan  is  entirely  feasible. 

SUGAR  FROM   SORGHUM 

Another  sugar  plant,  sorghum,  a  member  of  the  corn  family 
(see  Chapter  V)  resembling  both  kafir  corn  and  broom  corn, 
has  long  been  grown  in  southern,  central,  and  southwestern 
United  States  for  the  manufacture  of  syrup  for  local  use.  The 
juice  is  extracted  and  treated  like  the  juice  of  sugar  cane. 

During  the  Civil  War,  when  the  blockade  between  North  and 
South  stopped  shipments  of  sugar  and  especially  molasses  from 
Louisiana  to  the  North,  sorghum  was  grown  in  the  corn-belt  of 
the  North,  and  in  the  form  of  syrup  was  used  as  a  substitute  for 
the  product  of  the  sugar  cane.  A  century  ago  this  plant  ex- 
ceeded the  beet  in  sugar  content;  but  progress  in  improving  it 


OUR  MOST  ANCIENT  SUGAR  485 

has  been  slow.  Experiments  carried  on  for  many  years  at  Fort 
Scott,  Kansas,  have  at  last  resulted  in  the  making  of  satisfactory 
sugar  from  sorghum.  Now  that  the  laws  of  plant  breeding  are 
better  known,  its  sugar  content  may  be  susceptible  of  as  great 
improvement  as  that  which  has  taken  place  in  the  beet.  It  is 
quite  possible  that  a  century  hence  it  may  rival,  or  even  displace, 
the  sugar  beet  in  the  United  States,  because  like  corn  it  can  be 
cultivated  with  work  animals  and  machines. 


HONEY 

The  only  other  true  sugar  is  the  most  ancient  of  all,  one  that 
has  doubtless  been  available  for  millions  of  years;  namely, 
honey. 

Bee  culture,  with  its  products,  honey  and  wax,  preys  upon  the 
blind  thrift  of  an  insect.  Like  poultry  farming  it  depends  to 
an  important  extent  on  human  labor;  but  it  also  must  have  an 
environment  affording  nectar-bearing  flowers.  Where  rainfall 
permits  abundant  vegetation,  the  tropics  are  the  best  bee  lands. 
Honey  and  wax  are  important  exports  from  the  Greater  Antilles, 
and  there  seems  to  be  plenty  of  room  for  extension  of  the 
industry. 

Bees  are  among  the  most  highly  developed  of  animals.  Their 
care  is  one  of  the  most  scientific  and  fascinating  of  the  animal 
industries.  The  keeping  of  a  few  bees  is  common  in  nearly  all 
the  warmer  parts  of  United  States  and  Europe,  but  it  is  a  by- 
product industry  which,  owing  to  its  dependence  upon  blooming 
plants,  cannot  be  intensified.  It  is,  however,  by  no  means  fully 
developed,  as  Professor  George  A.  Coleman,  of  the  University  of 
California,  shows  by  a  report  to  the  effect  that  Santa  Cruz 
County,  California,  could  feed  10,000  more  colonies  of  bees, 
50,000,000  of  the  insects,  that  should  add  $200,000  a  year  to 
the  wealth  of  that  county.  In  emergencies,  the  bees,  like  the 
Danes  who  eat  margarine  and  sell  us  butter,  will  feed  in  the 
winter  on  cane  sugar  and  let  us  have  their  honey. 

GLUCOSE  is  a  substance  so  much  like  sugar  that  it  meets  the 
same  need.  It  is  found  in  grapes  and  raisins,  and  is  produced 
in  large  quantities  by  chemical  manufacture  from  the  starch  of 
corn  and  sold  under  the  commercial  name  of  corn  syrup  or  Karo. 


486  SUGAR 

"This  substance  is  entirely  wholesome  and  may  be  freely  em- 
ployed in  the  place  of  sugar."  * 

A  recent  Italian  discovery  may  also  have  much  significance 
for  the  future  of  the  world's  sugar.  An  expert  in  the  national 
experiment  station  at  Asti  has  invented  a  process  for  the  making 
of  fruit  honey  by  extracting  all  the  water  from  grape  juice, 
leaving  it  in  a  perfectly  keeping  form  suitable  for  preserving 
fruit,  making  soft  drinks,  and  perhaps  for  other  uses.  This 
process  may  aiford  a  valuable  outlet  to  the  European  wine- 
growers if  the  demand  for  wine  permanently  declines. 

*Lusk:  Food  in  War  Time,  p.  41. 


CHAPTER  XXIII 
TEA  AND  COFFEE 

COFFEE  and  tea  are  the  aristocrats  of  a  rather  large  number  of 
substances  used  to  satisfy  a  general  desire  for  some  kind  of  warm 
drink,  usually  with  our  meals.  Although  highly  prized  and 
costly,  tea  and  coffee  are  important  rather  for  the  comfort  and 
satisfaction  that  they  give  the  palate  than  for  their  actual  nutri- 
tive value.  Neither  is  of  any  real  use  in  the  diet,  as  evidenced 
by  the  millions  who  with  perfect  ease  get  along  without  both  and 
without  any  substitute.  Other  millions  who  use  the  one  or  the 
other  know  how  good  they  are  and  how  in  time  man  comes  to 
depend  on  them,  until  a  meal  without  them  seems  poor.  Their 
stimulating  influence  gives  them  a  hold  on  our  nervous  systems 
that  strongly  fixes  on  us  the  habit  of  using  them. 

So  general  is  their  esteem,  so  thoroughly  do  we  feel  the 
need  for  them  that  they  may  properly  be  called  staples  of  the 
world's  food  supply  as  they  are  of  the  world's  trade.  These  two 
staples  have  been  affected  by  the  war  less  than  almost  any 
others,  for  several  reasons:  the  lands  that  produce  them  were 
far  from  war's  disturbances;  both  tea  and  coffee  come  from  trees, 
so  that  the  existing  orchards  of  the  world  at  the  beginning  of 
the  war  could  almost  or  quite  maintain  production  for  a  term 
of  years ;  the  high  value  and  small  bulk  of  tea  and  coffee  make 
it  possible  to  continue  the  trade  in  them  whenever  trade  can  exist 
at  all.  Of  course,  the  blockade  kept  both  coffee  and  tea  out  of 
Germany,  and  the  Russians  suffered  from  a  great  tea  famine, 
along  with  the  many  other  privations  resulting  from  a  diminu- 
tion of  trade  unparalleled  in  the  history  of  the  commercial  world. 

COFFEE,    THE   TREE,   AND   THE   CLIMATE 

The  coffee  bean  grows  on  several  species  of  the  coffee  tree. 
One  of  them  (Arabica)  will  endure  rather  low  temperature,  and 
has  with  slight  protection  survived  the  winter  of  Germany,  but 

487 


488  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

is  of  no  commercial  value  where  the  average  temperature  for  a 
season  is  less  than  60°.  If  grown  under  tropic  conditions,  large 
shade  trees  must  tower  over  it  to  protect  it  from  the  full  heat 
of  the  sun.  Another  species,  the  Liberian,  can  stand  the  full 
heat  of  the  tropic  sun  even  at  low  elevations. 

Coffee  is  grown  in  many  countries  and  has  become  a  regular 
article  of  diet  in  many  parts  of  the  world;  but  the  estimated 
number  of  coffee  planters  in  the  world,  fifty  thousand,  is  less 
than  the  number  of  the  corn  growers  of  Illinois,  and  the  world's 
coffee  crop,  worth  about  $250,000,000,  is  not  so  valuable  as  the 
corn  crop  of  that  state.  Several  factors  combine  to  restrict 
coffee  producing  to  limited  and  widely  scattered  areas.  The 
plantation  cannot  endure  any  frost.  This  requirement  limits 
the  crop,  with  a  few  insignifiant  exceptions,  to  the  tropics,  al- 
though the  greatest  coffee  region,  Brazil,  is  close  to  the  edge  of 
the  temperate  zone,  where  the  groves  are  located  on  hills  to 
insure  protection  from  frost.  The  plant  requires  a  hot  climate, 
yet  the  trees  must  be  shaded — side  crops  of  corn,  bananas,  beans, 
or  coarse  varieties  of  peas  are  sometimes  grown  with  the  young 
trees  to  protect  them  from  the  full  rays  of  the  sun  and  to  insure 
some  income  before  the  coffee  is  matured.  The  climate  must  be 
moist  as  well  as  hot,  with  a  rainfall  of  from  seventy-five  to  one 
hundred  and  fifty  inches,  yet  the  soil  must  be  rich  and  also 
well  drained ;  coffee  growing  is  thus  practically  limited  to  hills 
and  uplands  where  rapid  slope  of  the  land  gives  the  necessary 
drainage.  These  conditions,  therefore,  tend  to  locate  the  best 
coffee  districts  on  plateaus  and  hilly  regions.  As  the  coffee  is 
usually  grown  for  export,  the  plantation  should  in  addition  be 
reasonably  near  the  seacoast.  A  rather  large  population  is  also 
necessary,  to  perform  the  large  amount  of  labor  required  in 
caring  for  the  crop. 

Coffee,  unlike  wheat,  corn,  rice,  apples,  bananas,  and  beans, 
has  not  been  known  for  ages.  The  plant  is  probably  a  native 
of  Abyssinia,  whence  it  was  taken  to  Arabia  about  the  eleventh 
century.  Its  spread  was  slow,  and  not  until  1562  were  the 
first  coffee  houses  opened  in  London.  As  an  important  article 
of  commerce,  coffee  really  belongs  to  the  nineteenth  century,  the 
quantity  consumed  having  about  doubled  between  1855  and  1885 
and  again  since  that  time ;  its  use  is  still  rapidly  increasing.  The 


THE  SHIFTING  SOURCES  OF  COFFEE  489 

chief  source  of  commercial  supply  has  shifted  far.  At  first, 
it  was  Arabia,  then  the  West  Indies ;  then  Java  had  the  suprem- 
acy; and  lastly  Brazil  has  taken  the  lead  with  a  produc- 
tion far  outdistancing  all  competitors— even  all  competitors 
combined. 


THE  GROWTH   AND   PREPARATION  OF   COFFEE 

The  tree  naturally  grows  to  from  twenty-five  to  thirty  feet 
in  height,  but  in  the  coffee  orchard  it  is  usually  pruned  and 
kept  down  to  from  five  to  eight  feet  in  height  to  permit  easy 
picking  of  the  berries.  The  berry,  which  looks  much  like  a 
cherry,  usually  incloses  two  coffee  grains  in  its  pulp.  After 
being  picked,  the  berry  is  put  through  a  number  of  mechanical 
processes,  the  first  of  which  takes  off  the  outer  pulp.  The  berry 
is  then  dried  in  the  sun,  a  process  requiring  from  six  to  eight 
days.  Rather  complicated  machinery  has  been  invented  to  cure 
the  coffee  after  it  has  been  picked  and  dried.  It  is  often  averred 
by  persons  in  a  position  to  know  that  these  machines,  on  a 
Brazilian  plantation,  turn  out  Rio,  Mocha,  Java,  and  other 
varieties  of  coffee.  Machines  remove  the  two  layers  of  inner 
husk,  and  various  sortings  and  gradings  separate  the  grains  so 
that  those  comprising  each  kind  of  coffee  are  of  the  same  appear- 
ance and  size. 

ARABIAN    COFFEE  GROWING 

One  of  the  best  places  to  grow  coffee  is  found  on  the  slopes 
which  face  the  lower  plain  along  the  Red  Sea  in  Yemen,  the 
southern  part  of  the  Arabian  Peninsula,  and  the  home  of  Mocha 
coffee,  of  which  much  is  heard  and  little  is  seen.  Here  the  shade- 
loving  coffee  tree  has  the  advantage  of  a  mist  which  rises  on  the 
lower  plain  almost  every  morning  in  the  year  and  toward  noon 
envelops  the  coffee-planted  slopes  in  a  haze  which  keeps  off  the 
full  rays  of  the  sun  and  also  gives  the  proper  moisture  for  the 
good  development  of  the  plant  and  the  production  of  its  seeds. 

The  fine  quality  of  this  Arabian  coffee  is  due  chiefly  to  the 
fact  that  it  is  carefully  prepared,  most  of  the  crop  being  bought 
on  the  trees  by  Turkish  and  Egyptian  merchants  who  personally 


490  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

superintend  the  harvest.  The  amount  of  coffee  grown  in  Yemen 
is  much  smaller  than  that  which  is  sold  under  that  name,  and  it 
is  much  smaller  than  the  demand.  In  Yemen,  coffee  is  purely  a 
money  crop,  and  is  not  used  by  the  natives,  who  drink  a  decoc- 
tion of  the  dried  hulls.  Only  a  small  portion  of  the  Yemen  land 
suitable  for  coffee  is  planted  to  that  crop.  Most  of  it  is  in 
dhurra,  a  grain  resembling  millet,  which  will  give  sixteen  crops 
before  the  coffee  trees  are  ready  to  bear.  It  is  a  long-time  propo- 
sition for  an  Arab  to  wait  for  the  coffee  tree,  especially  as  Yemen 
is  rather  an  arid  country  with  inadequate  irrigation,  poor  roads, 
high  taxes,  and  the  bad  government  that  has  so  long  blighted  the 
Turkish  Empire. 

INDIA    AND    CEYLON   AND   DUTCH   EAST   INDIES 

The  British  Government,  which  has  done  much  to  encourage 
agriculture  in  its  colonies,  encouraged  the  establishment  of  the 
coffee  industry  in  India  and  Ceylon.  The  chief  Indian  district 
is  located  on  the  eastern  or  interior  slopes  of  the  western  Ghats 
Mountains  in  southern  India,  where  elevation  and  climate  are 
suitable  for  coffee.  The  acreage  in  southern  India  is  declining 
slightly  because  of  the  low  price  of  coffee  for  the  twelve  years 
following  1897.  In  Ceylon,  with  its  moist  highlands,  coffee 
growing  quickly  became  important,  and  by  1880  was  the  chief 
export  of  the  island,  $15,000,000  worth  being  sold  abroad  an- 
nually. But  a  fungous  disease,  producing  leaf  rust,  broke  out 
in  Ceylonese  coffee  plantations,  so  injuring  the  trees  that  they 
could  not  produce  much  fruit,  or  killed  them  outright,  and 
brought  ruin  to  many  coffee  planters.  Some  substituted  cin- 
chona for  coffee,  but  most  turned  to  tea,  which  has  almost 
replaced  coffee  as  a  crop  on  the  Ceylonese  highlands.  The  only 
way  to  circumvent  the  blight  which  killed  coffee  of  the  Arabian 
species  was  to  introduce  the  more  hardy  Liberian  coffee,  a  native 
of  west  Africa ;  but  even  that  variety  is  not  entirely  immune  to 
the  blight.  This  species  of  coffee  is  now  grown  in  Java,  a  name 
under  which  not  only  the  product  of  this  island  is  sold,  but  also 
the  small  amount  of  coffee  produced  in  Sumatra,  Borneo,  Celebes, 
and  some  other  places.  The  Java  coffee  is  of  good  quality  be- 
cause it  is  grown  at  an  elevation  of  from  two  to  four  thousand 


TROPIC  AMERICAN  LEADERSHIP  491 

feet  upon  government  plantations,  where  careful  measures  in 
harvesting  the  crop  are  rigidly  enforced.  The  total  coffee  crop 
of  Asia  and  the  East  Indies  in  a  recent  year  was  less  than  one- 
sixteenth  that  of  Brazil. 

COFFEE  IN   SPANISH  AMERICA 

Coffee  is  one  of  the  best  money  crops  for  the  tropic  highland, 
and  for  this  reason  is  well  suited  to  Mexico,  Central  America, 
and  northern  South  America.  In  all  these  regions  the  rugged- 
ness  of  the  country  makes  transportation  difficult,  the  roads  are 
exceedingly  bad,  and  the  trail  for  pack  animals  is  often  the  only 
means  of  access.  Only  valuable  products  can  pay  for  such  trans- 
portation, and  coffee,  worth  from  six  to  twenty  cents  a  pound, 
stands  high  above  wheat,  worth  possibly  one  and  one-half  cents 
a  pound,  or  lumber,  with  its  low  value  and  difficult  form,  or  coal, 
sold  at  four  or  five  pounds  for  a  cent.  Geographic  and  economic 
factors  combine  in  an  interesting  way  to  influence  coffee  produc- 
tion in  mountain  districts.  The  elevation  that  produces  the 
proper  conditions  of  moisture,  temperature,  and  slope  also  makes 
the  climate  endurable  and  has  attracted  the  majority  of  the 
population  of  nearly  all  tropic  American  countries.  These  natu- 
ral labor  conditions  favor  the  production  of  coffee,  with  its  easy 
transportation.  The  traveler  may  see  on  the  distant  mountain- 
side a  bright  green  forest,  which  closer  examination  shows  to  be 
plantations  of  closely  pruned  little  coffee  trees  clinging  to  the 
steep  slopes.  The  high  prices  prevailing  in  1887-96  made  coffee 
growing  very  profitable,  and  it  became  one  of  the  chief  money 
crops  of  Mexico,  Central  America,  Colombia,  and  Venezuela,  as 
well  as  Brazil  and  some  of  the  West  Indies. 

In  Mexico,  coffee  thrives  best  in  the  central  of  the  three 
topographic  zones  which  comprise  that  varied  country.  The 
first  division,  the  hot  low  plain  along  the  seacoast,  is  considered 
too  hot  for  coffee ;  the  second,  the  high  plateau  inclosed  between 
the  eastern  and  western  cordilleras,  is  too  dry  and  too  cool ;  but 
the  outer  slopes  of  the  plateau,  the  so-called  "warm  land"  of  the 
Mexicans,  with  its  good  rainfall  and  its  succession  of  fertile, 
warm  valleys  and  forest-clad  slopes,  is  a  natural  coffee  region. 
Some  of  the  plantations  are  as  far  south  as  the  Isthmus  of 


492  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

Tehuantepec,  which,  however,  is  not  high  enough  for  the  most 
successful  coffee  growing. 

Southward  the  elevation  increases  and  the  plateau  of  Guate- 
mala and  Salvador  is  an  almost  continuous  coffee  plantation 
from  the  boundary  of  Mexico  to  the  boundary  of  Honduras. 
These  two  small  states  produce  more  coffee  than  all  Asia  and  the 
East  Indies,  and  it  comprises  over  two-thirds  of  their  total 
export.  Many  of  the  Guatemalan  plantations  are  owned  by 
German  capitalists  and  the  Germans  for  many  years  imported 
much  Guatemalan  coffee.  At  harvest-time  the  coffee  crop 
employs  half  of  the  population.  In  Costa  Rica,  the  plateaus  are 
even  higher  and  the  coffee  tree  upon  the  hillside  assures  the 
people  of  this  cool  plateau  the  European  and  American  imports 
brought  to  them  by  the  little  railway  that  climbs  up  five  thou- 
sand feet  from  the  Caribbean  port  of  Limon  to  San  Jose,  the 
capital. 

Colombia  and  Venezuela,  being  in  the  hottest  part  of  the 
torrid  zone,  have  lowlands  of  such  high  temperature  that  few 
persons  live  on  them  except  those  necessary  to  carry  on  the  com- 
merce between  the  seaports  and  the  interior  plateaus  among  the 
northern  ranges  of  the  Andes.  Here  again  the  valuable  bag  of 
coffee,  on  the  back  of  the  mule  as  he  climbs  down  to  the  seaport 
or  the  river  steamboat  landing,  represents  the  best  money  crop 
that  could  be  produced  in  these  isolated  plateau  districts.  Small 
quantities  of  coffee  are  produced  on  the  plateaus  of  Ecuador  and 
on  the  eastern  slopes  of  Peru,  whence  it  must  be  carried  by  mule 
and  railway  over  the  forbidding  mountain  chain  of  the  Andes. 
These  Andean  countries  grow  about  as  much  coffee  as  Central 
America  produces,  but  the  output  is  not  one-tenth  that  of  Brazil. 
On  the  eastern  slopes  of  the  Bolivian  Andes  is  the  province  of 
Yungas,  which  claims  to  have  the  best  coffee  in  the  world;  but 
there  is  not  enough  of  it  for  export. 

THE   WEST   INDIES 

The  coffee  tree  grows  in  nearly  all  of  the  West  Indian  Islands, 
but  the  island  of  Hayti,  occupied  by  the  two  states  of  Hayti  and 
San  Domingo,  is  the  heaviest  exporter.  In  Jamaica  the  "Blue 
Mountain  coffee,"  the  highest  priced  coffee  in  the  world,  is  pro- 


COFFEE  GROWING  498 

duced.  Its  fine  quality  is  due  to  the  alternating  rain  and  sun- 
shine that  there  lasts  throughout  the  year ;  but  the  crop  amounts 
to  only  a  few  tons  per  year.  It  is  ceasing  to  be  a  plantation 
crop,  and  is  passing  into  the  hands  of  the  small  cultivator.  Porto 
Rico  is  well  fitted  by  climate,  soil,  and  labor  supply  to  produce 
the  good  coffee  that  has  for  many  years  been  an  important 
export.  Before  this  island  was  annexed  by  the  United  States, 
its  chief  market  was  in  Spain,  where  the  Porto  Rican  coffee  with 
its  peculiar  flavor  was  in  demand.  When  the  Americans  took 
possession,  the  Spanish  Government  imposed  a  tariff  on  Porto 
Rican  coffee,  depressing  its  price,  and  producing  hard  times  in 
Porto  Rico ;  but  the  United  States  Government  has  tried  to  im- 
prove the  methods  of  coffee  growing  and  to  introduce  varieties 
acceptable  in  the  markets  of  the  United  States. 

BRAZIL 

Brazil  is  lord  of  the  coffee  world,  with  production  greater  than 
that  of  all  other  countries  combined.  Three-fourths  of  the 
world's  crop  is  produced  there,  yet  the  coffee  region  occupies 
but  a  small  corner  of  the  country,  which  is  as  large  as  the  United 
States  and  Great  Britain  combined.  Systems  of  railways  thread 
the  coffee  zone  and  come  down  to  the  two  great  coffee  ports  of 
Rio  de  Janeiro  and  Santos. 

The  large  and  prosperous  city  of  Sao  Paulo,  the  capital  of  the 
province  of  Sao  Paulo,  is  the  chief  city  of  the  coffee-producing 
district,  which  slopes  away  from  the  Coast  Range,  toward  the 
Parana  River  in  the  interior.  On  this  plateau,  between  600  and 
2,500  feet  above  the  sea,  are  thousands  of  square  miles  of  a  rich 
red  volcanic  soil  capable  of  producing  several  times  as  much 
coffee  as  the  world  needs.  The  southeast  trade  winds  bring  from 
the  south  Atlantic  an  abundant  rainfall,  completing  the  natural 
conditions  for  coffee  production. 

Partly  because  of  this  abundance  of  land,  the  Brazilian  coffee 
estates  are  often  of  enormous  size.  In  times  of  prosperity  their 
owners  live  luxuriously  in  the  capitals  of  Europe,  while  the 
estates  are  cultivated  by  overseers  who  employ  as  laborers  the 
incompetent  negroes,  who  were  slaves  until  1892.  Of  late  Italian 
immigrants  have  begun  to  replace  the  negroes,  who  are  drifting 


494  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

to  the  coast  settlements  north  of  Rio  de  Janeiro.  It  is  the  task  of 
one  workman  to  take  care  of  two  thousand  coffee  trees,  which 
cover  about  five  acres.  Brazilian  coffee  does  not  bear  as  good  a 
name  in  the  world's  market  as  does  that  of  Mocha,  or  Java, 
chiefly  because  of  the  inferior  care  bestowed  on  the  harvesting 
in  a  country  where  efficient  labor  is  so  much  more  difficult  to 
obtain  than  in  Java  and  Yemen.  In  Java,  the  ripe  coffee  berries 
are  picked  off,  while  the  green  ones  are  allowed  to  remain  on 
the  branch,  but  in  Brazil  it  is  not  uncommon  for  green  and 
ripe  berries  alike  to  be  swept  off  the  branch  by  a  single  motion 
of  the  hand,  though  the  unripe  coffee  makes  a  product  of  inferior 
quality.  Great  efforts  have  been  made  in  Brazil  of  late  years 
to  improve  the  quality  of  coffee,  especially  by  the  introduction 
of  imported  machinery.  As  this  machinery  is  very  expensive, 
large  coffee  cleaning  and  grading  establishments  are  to  be  found 
only  in  the  large  towns,  and  on  a  few  of  the  largest  plantations. 
Some  of  the  plantations  are  so  large  that  private  railways  run 
through  them  to  carry  the  workmen  and  coffee  from  one  place 
to  another.  As  the  land  is  cheap,  careless  cultivation  prevails, 
and  the  heavy  rains  do  enormous  damage  to  the  resources  of  the 
country  by  washing  away  the  fertile  soil. 

GREAT  FLUCTUATIONS   IN   PRICE 

Owing  to  the  fact  that  the  land  suitable  for  coffee  is  so  much 
more  extensive  than  the  land  needed  for  coffee,  the  limiting 
factor  in  its  production  is  the  danger  of  oversupplying  the 
market,  which  brings  low  prices  and  loss.  The  same  situation 
prevails  with  coffee  as  with  the  potato  and  truck  crops,  but  the 
coffee  tree  differs  greatly  from  the  potato  plant  in  taking  several 
years  to  mature  and  then  producing  for  several  decades  there- 
after. Hence  the  alternating  cycles  of  riotous  prosperity  and 
ruinous  depression  are  long.  High  prices  prevailed  in  the  coffee 
market  from  1887  to  1896,  and  enormous  numbers  of  coffee  trees 
were  planted  in  nearly  all  coffee-growing  countries  and  in  many 
new  countries  as  well.  The  trees  begin  to  bear  in  about  six  years 
and  may  yield  for  thirty  or  forty  more.  By  1897  the  pro- 
duction was  so  large  that  the  price  fell  while  the  yield  kept  on 
increasing  until  1902.  The  chart  of  coffee  prices  shows  most 


COFFEE  PRICE 


495 


conclusively  how  this  industry  has  been  influenced  by  the  plant- 
ing of  many  trees  in  time  of  high  price  and  the  absence  of 
planting  in  periods  of  low  price,  with  resultant  alternate  booms 
and  depressions.  This  tendency  is  apparent  in  many  industries, 
but  especially  in  that  large  class  of  agricultural  products  subject 


Cents 
21 

X 
19 
18 
17 
10 
15 
14 
13 
12 
11 
10 

9 

8 

7 

6 


1911 


/    I 


1911 


Averag  I  Import  Prices  Tor  U.S 


Whole  Me  Price-  New  York  > 


air  to  p  ime 


g     6      8 


FIG.  127. — Cycles  in  price  of  coffee — a  product  capable  of  easy  over- 
production. (Idea  from  Chisholm.)  High  price,  over  12  cents,  means 
prosperity.  The  resultant  heavy  planting  and  enlarged  crop  makes  over- 
supply,  low  price,  and  decline  of  orchards  until  demand  catches  up  and 
makes  high  prices  to  start  another  cycle. 

to  overproduction.  The  hard  times  following  the  fall  of  prices 
in  1897  brought  great  hardship  to  Brazil,  as  to  all  the  other 
regions  where  coffee  was  the  chief  export.  These  hard  times 
were  particularly  acute  for  Brazil,  because  of  its  almost  com- 
plete dependence  on  coffee.  The  coffee  district  is  the  chief  center 
of  white  population  in  Brazil.  In  the  leading  state,  Sao  Paulo, 


496  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

ninety  per  cent,  of  the  wealth  comes  from  coffee  plantations  and 
coffee  traffic.     Sometimes  this  situation  is  called  monoculture. 

In  an  effort  to  restore  prices,  which  were  practically  down  to 
the  cost  of  production,  the  Brazilian  Government  taxed  new 
coffee  plantations  for  several  years  and  financed  a  great  but 
unsuccessful  attempt  to  buy  up  the  surplus  of  coffee  and  hold 
it  for  an  advance  in  price. 

THE   COFFEE  SUPPLY  AND   THE  DECLINE  OF  THE  INDUSTRY  IN  NEW 

COFFEE   REGIONS 

The  world-wide  fall  in  the  price  of  coffee  from  the  profitable 
level  of  1895  to  the  unprofitable  level  that  prevailed  for  more 
than  a  decade  after  1897,  suddenly  checked  the  spread  of  coffee 
growing  in  countries  where  it  had  been  recently  introduced.  In 
British  Central  Africa,  coffee  growing  upon  the  Shire  highlands 
had  just  been  established,  and  led  all  other  exports  in  value ;  but 
the  low  prices,  aided  by  droughts,  reduced  the  area  under  culti- 
vation in  less  than  ten  years  from  17,000  to  5,000  acres.  The 
planters  sought  a  profitable  substitute  for  the  coffee  on  which 
they  had  based  their  early  hopes.  A  similar  fate  overtook  the 
coffee  industry  of  Hawaii  and  Paraguay,  in  both  of  which  coun- 
tries, as  in  British  East  Africa,  the  industry  was  just  springing 
up ;  but  these  countries  could  not  compete  with  Brazil,  which  is 
more  than  able  to  furnish  the  25,000  square  miles  now  needed 
to  grow  the  world's  coffee.  The  price  of  coffee  is  a  temptation 
to  the  grower,  and  the  dangers  of  the  business  are  well  illus- 
trated by  conditions  in  the  Malay  Peninsula,  where  coffee  grow- 
ing was  established  in  the  world  coffee  boom  between  1893  and 
1899.  A  picul  (133  pounds)  cost  about  $15  to  grow.  For  a 
time  it  sold  for  $25  and  all  went  merrily.  Then  the  price  fell 
to  less  than  $15,  and  the  coffee  growers  began  to  plant  rubber 
trees  on  their  plantations.  By  1905  the  price  of  coffee  had  gone 
up  to  $30  a  picul,  and  since  that  time  it  has  been  $45,  for  we 
are  now  in  an  era  of  high  prices,  save  for  the  decline  in  trade 
caused  by  the  war.  Doubtless  in  a  few  years  the  plantings  will 
again  catch  up  with  the  demand  and  another  slump  will  come. 

Although  coffee  was  early  introduced  into  England,  it  has 
largely  been  replaced  there  by  tea.  The  Dutch,  owners  of  Java, 


DRINKING  TEA  497 

are  the  leading  coffee  users,  with  a  consumption  of  twenty 
pounds  per  capita  per  year.  The  Americans  and  Belgians  use 
half  as  much  as  the  Dutch,  and  the  Germans  and  Swiss  one-third 
as  much,  when  they  can  get  it.  During  the  Great  War  the  Ger- 
mans were  busy  manufacturing  a  great  variety  of  coffee  substi- 
tutes, partly  by  roasting  cereals  and  acorns.  Coffee  is  the  chief 
non-alcoholic  beverage  of  France  and  other  countries  of  western 
Europe,  and  Havre,  with  millions  of  sacks  sometimes  in  her 
warehouses,  has  for  years  been  the  leading  coffee  market. 

TEA,   AND  FACTORS  AFFECTING  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  TEA  CULTURE 

Drinks  made  from  decoctions  of  leaves  are  more  common  than 
those  from  decoctions  of  seeds;  various  plants  have  been  used 
and  are  used  for  this  purpose  in  various  parts  of  the  world.  The 
usual  tea  of  commerce  is  the  dried  leaf  of  a  tree  native  in  the 
hills  of  Assam,  one  of  the  eastern  states  of  British  India.  The 
tree  is  quite  hardy,  standing  a  frosty  climate,  thriving  in  cen- 
tral China  and  the  cotton-belt  of  the  United  States,  and  in  many 
places  were  no  tea  is  produced.  The  distribution  of  the  tea- 
growing  industry  gives  us  one  of  the  best  examples  of  the  work- 
ing of  combined  geographic  and  economic  forces.  The  large 
amount  of  skilful  hand  labor  required  in  packing  and  preparing 
tea  makes  it  necessary  that  tea  be  grown  in  regions  of  dense 
population  with  resultant  low  wage.  For  this  reason  the  tea 
industry,  despite  interesting  American  prospectuses  and  high 
American  hopes,  has  remained  and  will  remain  in  the  populous 
Orient.  In  cultivation  the  tea  tree  is  usually  kept  down  by 
pruning  to  a  height  of  from  five  to  six  feet  so  that  the  leaves 
can  be  picked  by  hand ;  but  when  allowed  free  growth  it  attains 
considerable  size.  It  is  very  hard  for  a  plant  to  survive  the 
plucking  of  its  leaves,  especially  the  young  leaves;  hence  tea  is 
successfully  produced  only  where  growth  is  promoted  by  the 
most  favorable  conditions — an  abundant  moisture  supply  and  a 
warm  temperature.  Little  oil  cells  give  the  leaf  its  fla/or,  while 
the  stimulating  quality  comes  from  a  substance  called  theine 
•which  is  almost  exactly  the  same  as  the  caffeine  of  the  coffee  and 
the  stimulating  principle  in  cocoa  or  chocolate. 


498  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

CONSUMPTION   OF  TEA 

The  cultivation  of  tea  began  rather  late  in  Chinese  history, 
about  the  ninth  century  A.D.,  and  it  was  long  the  only  Chinese 
export  to  the  Western  World.  Some  of  the  leaf  was  introduced 
into  England  in  1657,  and  commanded  in  that  country  a  price 
of  $15  per  pound  in  1665;  but  by  the  end  of  that  century  it 
was  quite  common,  and  Britain  soon  became  the  leading  tea- 
drinking  nation,  a  result  of  the  seafaring  habit.  The  distribu- 
tion of  the  tea  habit  shows  clearly  the  influence  of  national  com- 
merce. Britain  began  to  use  tea  at  the  very  time  when  she 
triumphed  over  her  great  sea  rival,  Holland,  and  her  shipping 
has  given  her  a  large  part  of  the  world's  tea  trade  as  well  as 
its  tea  consumption.  The  English-speaking  peoples  consume 
nearly  three-fourths  of  the  supply  of  commercial  tea;  Russia, 
with  her  long-used  caravan  routes  to  China,  uses  nearly  all  the 
rest.  The  consumption  per  capita  shows  it  to  be  essentially  the 
drink  of  Orientals  and  of  the  English  peoples,  the  average  per 
person  being  six  pounds  per  year  in  the  United  Kingdom  and 
seven  pounds  among  the  Australasians,  who  are  thoroughly 
British  and  are  even  better  able  to  buy  than  are  the  people 
of  the  United  Kingdom.  Canada  averages  4  pounds  per  capita, 
Holland  1.75,  the  United  States  1.4,  and  Russia  1.25.  The 
Russians  are  usually  described  as  great  tea  drinkers;  the  state- 
ment is  true  for  the  wealthier  classes,  but  the  vast  masses  of 
the  Russian  population  are  too  poor  to  buy  tea.  The  Germans 
consumed  less  than  one-seventh  of  a  pound  per  capita  before  the 
war,  and  the  French  (wine  growers  and  coffee  drinkers)  but  an 
ounce  per  year.  The  use  of  tea  is  very  common  throughout 
Siberia,  the  trans-Caspian  provinces,  and  Persia,  as  for  some 
centuries  it  has  been  a  commodity  in  the  caravan  trade  across 
the  heart  of  Asia. 

CHINESE  TEA  INDUSTRY 

It  is  impossible  to  say  how  much  tea  is  used  in  China.  It  is 
widely  grown  in  that  country  in  family  gardens  for  home  use. 
The  tea  habit  of  the  Chinese  and  Japanese  seems  to  be  the  result 
of  an  attempt  to  make  pleasant  the  drinking  of  boiled  water — a 


PREPARING  TEA  499 

necessity  long  ago  recognized  by  these  peoples,  who  live  on  a  land 
laden  with  the  germs  resulting  from  the  density  of  population 
and  the  custom  of  fertilizing  land  with  human  excrements.  They 
knew  nothing  about  the  germ  theory  of  disease,  but  they  did 
know  that  people  who  drank  boiled  water  remained  well,  and 
that  those  who  drank  raw  water  fell  ill.  Hence  they  adopted  the 
habit  of  drinking  boiled  waters  and  improving  the  flavor  with 
tea.  The  entire  Chinese  crop  is  grown  in  the  tea  gardens  of  the 
small  land  holders,  chiefly  in  central  China;  and  that  country 
was  for  a  long  time  the  leading  producer  of  tea  for  export. 

Chinese  tea  is  usually  picked  three  times  a  year,  the  first 
growth  in  March,  the  second  in  May,  and  the  third  in  August. 
The  choicest  first  pickings  are  so  highly  prized  at  home  that  they 
are  rarely  exported.  The  later  pickings  of  an  inferior  grade 
are  for  the  use  of  foreigners.  After  the  picking,  which  is  usually 
done  by  women  and  children,  the  leaves  are  wilted  in  pans  over 
a  fire.  They  are  then  rolled  into  balls  by  hand  to  squeeze  out  the 
sap,  and  arc  dried  on  screens,  care  being  taken  not  to  let  the  hot 
sun  burn  them.  They  arc  further  dried  by  "firing"  in  copper 
pans  over  a  fire,  being  stirred  the  while,  it  is  said,  with  bare 
hands,  although  the  pans  are  white  hot.  Inferior  tea  is  stirred 
with  sticks.  After  the  firing,  the  leaves  are  hung  up  in  sacks 
for  a  day,  then  picked  over,  sifted,  assorted,  and  by  aid  of  bare 
feet  packed  into  tea  chests  for  export.  In  some  grades  of  tea, 
each  leaf  is  rolled  by  human  fingers.  The  difference  between 
black  and  green  tea  is  merely  a  difference  in  curing,  although 
the  two  kinds  are  rarely  grown  in  the  same  locality.  Early  in 
the  curing  process,  if  the  tea  is  to  be  black,  it  is  piled  up  in 
heaps  half-cured  and  allowed  to  ferment ;  the  fermentation  drives 
off  half  the  tannin,  of  which  tea  has  ten  to  twelve  per  cent. 
This  process  gives  a  flavor  much  desired  in  many  markets. 

The  province  of  Szechuen,  one  of  the  western  provinces  on  the 
headwaters  of  the  Yangtse-Kiang,  has  a  very  large  population, 
estimated  at  over  sixteen  million,  a  number  about  equal  to  the 
population  of  Brazil.  The  people  have  supported  themselves  in 
that  inland  location  for  generations  by  household  industries  and 
agriculture.  Most  of  their  few  exports  go  down  the  rapids 
of  the  Yangtse-Kiang  to  Hankow  and  Shanghai ;  but  they  also 
send  into  Tibet  some  of  the  worst  tea  in  the  world.  It  is  made 


500  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

by  cutting  off  twelve-inch  twigs  of  a  tea  tree,  roughly  drying 
them  in  the  sun,  chopping  them  up,  twigs  and  all,  sticking  them 
together  with  rice  paste  and  then  compressing  the  mass  into  hard 
bricks  for  shipment  over  the  fearful  passes  of  Tibet  on  the  backs 
of  coolies,  mules,  and  camels.  The  ease  with  which  this  com- 
pressed form  of  tea  may  be  carried  accounts  for  its  shipment  by 
caravan  into  Eussia  at  an  early  date.  The  chief  seat  of  brick- 
tea  shipment  is  Hankow  on  the  Yangtse-Kiang  in  central  China. 
While  the  tea  has  generally  been  considered  to  be  of  very  poor 
quality,  it  has  greatly  improved  of  late  years ;  some  of  the  brick 
tea  has  for  some  years  been  made  in  Hankow  under  Russian 
management,  and  great  care  is  exercised  'to  see  that  the  quality 
is  good. 

JAPAN 

Tea,  like  coffee,  requires  fertile  but  well-drained  soil  and  much 
moisture,  a  combination  of  conditions  usually  furnished  best  by 
hillsides.  These  requirements,  together  with  the  large  amount  of 
labor  required,  make  it  a  crop  admirably  suited  to  Japan,  where 
the  great  demand  for  food  causes  the  level  land  to  be  prized  for 
rice  and  grain  crops ;  tea  growing  in  terraces  on  the  steep  hill- 
sides fits  in  admirably  with  the  Japanese  economy.  Tea  for  home 
use  is  still  prepared  by  hand  in  the  old-fashioned  way,  but  for 
export  it  is  almost  entirely  cured  by  machinery;  the  standard 
Japanese  teas  are  green  teas  and  the  United  States  is  their 
principal  market.  Thousands  of  boxes  are  sent  directly  to 
Chicago,  St.  Louis,  and  other  interior  points  by  way  of  the 
trans-Pacific  steamers  which  sail  from  Yokohama  to  Vancouver, 
Seattle,  Portland,  and  San  Francisco,  where  they  connect  with 
the  trans-continental  American  railway  lines. 

FORMOSA 

The  best  tea  in  the  world  is  grown  by  the  Chinese  in  the 
island  of  Formosa,  which  has  belonged  to  Japan  since  the  Chino- 
Japanese  War  of  1894.  The  eastern  half  of  this  tropic  island  is 
still  possessed  by  head-hunting  savages,  and  tea  growing  by 
Chinese  immigrants  on  the  west  half  is  a  comparatively  recent 
industry.  Most  of  the  eighteen  or  twenty  million  pounds  per 


NEW  TEA  REGIONS  501 

year  is  cured  by  American  and  English  firms  for  sale  in  their 
home  countries. 


INTRODUCTION   OF  TEA   IN   BRITISH   COLONIES 

The  world's  tea  trade  has  been  revolutionized  during  the  last 
fifty  years  as  a  result  of  the  activities  of  the  British  Government 
in  introducing  tea  growing  into  India  and  Ceylon.  In  the  year 
1888  the  British  import  of  this  commodity  from  China  fell  below 
the  import  from  the  British  colonies  of  India  and  Ceylon. 
Between  1881  and  1900  the  Chinese  export  fell  from  300  million 
to  215  million  pounds,  and  in  the  year  1905  a  commission  of 
Chinese  experts  was  sent  out  from  the  tea-growing  province  of 
Nanking  to  study  methods  of  tea  growing  in  British  India. 
China  had  fallen  behind  because  her  unprogressive  tea  growers 
clung  to  the  old  hand  methods  of  their  remote  ancestors,  while 
her  rivals,  under  the  British  flag  and  the  British  teacher,  had 
attacked  the  problem  in  the  scientific  spirit  with  unbiased  minds 
and  had  been  using  many  labor-saving  machines.  Another  result 
of  this  production  of  tea  in  new  regions  has  been  a  steadily 
decreasing  price  since  1885,  so  that  at  the  present  time  tea 
growing  is  not  a  very  prosperous  industry. 

The  tea  plantations  of  India  cover  about  a  half-million  acres, 
four-fifths  of  which  lies  in  the  northeastern  part  in  east  Bengal 
and  Assam,  regions  tributary  to  the  port  of  Calcutta.  The  tea 
is  grown  on  the  hills  sloping  down  from  the  great  plateau  of 
Tibet  and  to  some  extent  in  many  other  places  along  the  southern 
slopes  of  the  Himalaya  Mountains,  a  district  receiving  tremen- 
dous summer  rains.  In  southern  India  on  the  Nilgiri  hills  is  the 
most  important  Indian  tea  district  outside  of  Assam  and  Bengal. 
Because  of  its  low  latitude  this  district  produces  best  at  an 
elevation  of  from  4,800  to  5,600  feet  above  sea  level,  while  on 
the  slopes  of  the  Himalayas  the  plantations  find  the  temperature 
that  best  suits  tea  at  3,500  feet  or  less. 

EUROPEAN  TEA  INDUSTRY  OF  CEYLON 

Instead  of  being  picked  three  times  a  year,  as  in  China,  the 
tea  of  India  is  gathered  every  ten  days  during  the  period  of  the 

UBftARV 


502  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

monsoon  rains  in  summer.  The  orchards  of  Assam,  like  those 
of  Japan,  average  450  to  500  pounds  of  tea  per  acre.  The  still 
more  humid  hills  of  Ceylon  are  probably  the  best  tea-growing 
regions  in  the  world.  There  the  leaves  can  be  plucked  every  two 
weeks  throughout  the  year  and  the  land  has  yielded  1,000  pounds 
of  dry  tea  per  acre,  a  quantity  greater  in  actual  weight  than 
the  average  wheat  yield  of  the  United  States. 

The  tea  industry  is  new  in  Ceylon;  it  was  taken  up  very 
suddenly  by  the  coffee  planters  after  the  blights  had  destroyed 
the  coffee  trees.  In  1867  there  were  10  acres  of  tea  on  the 
island;  in  1887,  2,700;  in  1897,  170,000;  in  1904,  338,000— but 
the  prices  were  so  low  that  no  new  tea  orchards  were  then  being 
set  out.  The  Ceylonese  method  of  growing  tea  is  typical  of  the 
most  successful  method  of  engaging  in  tropical  industries.  More 
than  half  of  the  plantations  are  owned  by  corporations,  and 
nearly  all  are  managed  by  English  superintendents.  The  aver- 
age size  of  the  plantation  is  three  hundred  acres,  while  in  China 
it  is  probably  a  small  fraction  of  an  acre.  The  work  on  a  Ceylon 
tea  plantation  is  done  by  coolies  (men,  women,  and  children), 
many  of  them  Tamils  from  southern  India,  who  usually  return 
to  their  homes  across  the  straits  after  a  period  of  work  has  given 
them  a  little  money.  So  many  people  travel  thus  that  a  railroad 
has  been  built  across  the  reefs  in  the  rather  wide  strait  that 
separates  Ceylon  from  India.  The  intensity  of  the  tea  industry 
and  its  dependence  upon  a  dense  population  is  shown  by  the  fact 
that  less  than  six  hundred  square  miles  of  tea  plantations 
furnish  employment  for  about  four  hundred  thousand  coolies, 
a  ratio  of  one  person  to  the  acre.  Very  different  is  the  Ameri- 
can corn-belt  farm  of  160  acres,  whose  proprietor  often  has  only 
one  hired  man,  employed  for  a  part  of  the  year,  to  help  him 
grow  and  harvest  forty  acres  of  corn,  forty  acres  of  hay,  forty 
acres  of  oats,  fatten  forty  cattle,  and  grow  sixty  hogs,  besides 
raising  enough  horses  for  his  own  use  with  an  occasional  pair  to 
sell. 

THE   LABOR   FACTOR  AND   UNITED  STATES   TEA   GROWING 

The  vast  amount  of  hand  labor  used  in  pruning  and  caring  for 
tea  trees  and  picking  and  curing  the  tea  shows  why  the  tea 


LABOR  AND  TEA  GROWING  503 

industry  has  not  been  developed  in  the  United  States,  although 
it  has  long  been  known  that  the  tea  tree  may  grow  over  an  area 
one  hundred  times  greater  than  all  the  tea  plantations  in  India 
and  Ceylon.  A  little  tea  of  good  quality  has  for  some  years 
been  produced  near  Charleston,  chiefly  by  the  labor  of  negro 
children,  but  naturally  the  industry  does  not  expand  in  this 
region  of  relatively  high  wages.  It  costs  fifteen  cents  a  pound  to 
pick  tea  in  South  Carolina,  and  the  laborers  there  have  been 
unable  to  learn  a  certain  dexterous  movement  that  pulls  a  leaf 
without  destroying  the  bud  in  the  axis  of  its  stem.  To  avoid 
losing  the  bud  they  pinch  off  the  leaf,  wasting  about  one-third 
of  the  weight  of  the  leaf. 

If  high  wages  did  not  suffice  to  keep  the  tea  industry  from 
thriving  in  the  United  States,  the  low  rainfall  in  the  picking 
season  would  add  the  finishing  touch.  At  most  the  rainfall  is 
about  thirty  inches,  enough  for  corn  arid  cotton,  but  not  nearly 
enough  for  the  tea  plant,  which  is  being  subjected  to  the  fearful 
strain  of  having  its  leaves  continually  plucked.  The  monsoon 
climates  of  southeastern  Asia,  with  fifty,  sixty,  one  hundred,  two 
hundred,  and  even  more  than  two  hundred  inches  of  rain  in  tho 
summer  period,  are  beyond  doubt  the  best  places  in  the  world 
to  grow  tea.  Small  tea  orchards  have  been  planted  in  many 
other  places,  including  the  Russian  province  of  Trans-Caucasia, 
where  the  climate  must  be  more  definitely  against  the  industry 
than  in  monsoon  regions  such  as  the  Malay  Pennisula,  French 
India,  and  Burma,  or  the  trade-wind  regions,  such  as  Jamaica, 
Madagascar,  and  Brazil,  in  all  of  which  tea  growing  is  being 
tried  in  a  small  way. 

Java  has  the  best  combination  of  conditions  to  rival  the  four 
great  tea  countries,  China,  Japan,  India,  and  Ceylon;  but  the 
low  prices  have  caused  a  decline  of  tea  acreage  even  there. 

OTHER  TEAS 

The  leaves  of  a  number  of  other  plants  are  locally  used  as  tea 
in  various  places  throughout  the  world.  In  southeastern  United 
States  the  Cherokees  and  other  Indians  dried  the  leaves  of  a 
holly  plant  from  which  they  made  yupon,  or  "black  drink." 
The  plant  contains  real  caffeine  and  is  widely  distributed  over 


504  TEA  AND  COFFEE 

the  southeastern  United  States  from  Virginia  to  Texas.  White 
people  learned  its  use  from  the  Indians  and  in  early  times  it  was 
quite  popular.  Dr.  R.  M.  Harper,  of  the  United  States  Depart- 
ment of  Agriculture,  found  it  still  growing  and  used  in  1916  by 
the  farmers  on  an  island  in  one  of  the  sounds  just  south  of  Nor- 
folk. In  Australia  the  eucalyptus  leaf  is  used ;  in  South  Africa 
is  a  so-called  Bushman  tea ;  a  grass  called  lemon  grass  is  used  in 
India ;  while  in  the  Island  of  Bourbon  or  Reunion,  in  the  Indian 
Ocean,  the  so-called  "burbon  tea"  is  made  from  a  dry  orchid. 

Of  all  the  minor  teas  the  mate  or  Paraguay  tea  is  the  nearest 
rival  of  the  ordinary  tea  of  commerce.  This  plant,  which  is  a 
member  of  the  holly  family,  grows  wild  in  southern  Brazil  and 
in  Paraguay,  in  which  latter  country  it  is  also  grown  in  planta- 
tions. The  leaf  is  dried,  but  less  carefully  than  the  tea  of  the 
Orient.  It  is  widely  used  by  the  people  of  Paraguay,  and 
several  million  pounds  are  exported  to  Argentina,  Uruguay,  and 
Brazil,  together  with  smaller  quantities  to  some  other  parts  of 
South  America.  A  little  is  even  sent  to  Europe,  and  the  amount 
is  rapidly  increasing.  The  total  export  from  Paraguay  was 
worth  more  than  a  half-million  dollars  in  1909.  Some  is  now 
being  exported  from  Brazil.  The  summer  rains  of  the  mate- 
belt  favor  the  rapid  leaf  growth  necessary  for  a  leaf-yielding 
crop  like  tea. 

It  is  plain  that  any  real  shortage  in  tea  or  coffee  is  about  as 
unlikely  as  a  shortage  of  potatoes.  As  to  tea  land — there  is 
plenty  of  it,  for  we  do  not  need  much.  All  the  crop  of  Japan 
is  grown  on  less  than  two  hundred  and  fifty  square  miles.  Like 
the  potato  grower,  the  orange  grower,  and  the  apple  grower, 
coffee  planters  and  tea  planters  chiefly  and  properly  fear  over- 
production and  an  unprofitable  price,  to  which  they  have  been 
from  time  to  time  subjected,  and  probably  will  be  subjected  for 
indefinite  generations  to  come:  for  it  is  scarcely  to  be  expected 
that  there  can  be  maintained  an  exact  ratio  between  production 
and  consumption  while  the  price  is  profitable  to  the  grower  and 
plenty  of  land  is  available  for  the  extension  of  plantations. 


CHAPTER  XXIV 
CHOCOLATE  AND  SPICES 

THE   CONFUSION   OF   CHOCOLATE   NAMES 

THE  chocolate  and  cocoa  of  commerce  are  prepared  from  the 
seeds  of  the  cacao  tree,  which,  because  of  its  name,  is  often 
confused  with  the  coco  palm  which  gives  us  the  large,  hard- 
shelled  coconut  (usually  spelled  cocoanut).  Further  confusion 
is  furnished  by  the  coca  tree,  the  leaves  of  which  are  sent  to 
market  from  the  east  slopes  of  the  Andes  in  Peru  and  Bolivia 
for  the  preparation  of  the  drug  cocaine.  The  word  cacao  here 
refers  to  the  dried  bean  of  the  theobroma  tree.  From  these 
beans  we  make  chocolate  or  cocoa.  While  chocolate  contains 
the  stimulating  element  common  also  to  tea  and  coffee, 
it  differs  from  them  in  carrying  large  amounts  of  nutrition. 
The  bean  in  its  native  form  is  nearly  fifty  per  cent,  fat,  which 
remains  in  chocolate,  but  most  of  which  is  removed  in  the  manu- 
facture of  the  powder  we  call  cocoa. 

ORIGIN   AND   PRODUCTION 

The  cacao  tree  is  a  native  of  tropical  America,  growing  wild 
in  the  Amazon  and  Orinoco  River  Valley  forests  up  to  an 
elevation  of  four  hundred  feet.  There  are  several  species  of  the 
tree,  and  in  cultivation  there  are  many  varieties  of  each  of  sev- 
eral species.  At  the  time  of  the  discovery  of  America,  it  was 
grown  for  food  from  Panama  to  Guatemala  and  Yucatan,  and 
to  some  extent  in  the  lowlands  of  Mexico,  in  which  country  it 
was  so  prized  that  the  dry  seeds  passed  as  money  among  the 
Aztecs  of  the  plateau.  The  Spaniards  carried  it  from  Acapulco 
to  the  Philippines  and  the  early  exportation  of  the  beans  to 
Spain  and  Portugal  has  caused  its  use  to  become  so  general  in 
these  countries  that  no  other  European  people  eat  more  than 

505 


506  CHOCOLATE  AND  SPICES 

one-sixth  as  much  per  capita.  The  use  of  cacao  is  rapidly 
spreading;  it  furnishes  a  table  drink,  a  highly  prized  material 
for  candy,  and  an  acceptable,  very  nutritious  food  for  travelers 
and  explorers. 

The  climatic  requirements  of  cacao  are  exacting.  The  tree, 
which  is  fifteen  to  thirty  feet  high  with  a  trunk  eight  to  ten 
inches  in  diameter,  requires  more  heat  than  coffee  and  yet  cannot 
stand  the  full  blaze  of  the  tropic  sun,  and  so  is  grown  under 
the  shade  of  taller  trees,  the  young  plantation  being  some- 
times shaded  by  bananas.  It  requires  much  moisture,  with  soil 
rich  and  deep,  so  that  it  is  almost  always  grown  upon  low 
plains.  The  valuable  seeds  or  beans  are  produced  to  the  number 
of  thirty  to  sixty  in  a  greenish  or  reddish  pod,  two  to  six  inches 
in  diameter  and  six  to  fifteen  inches  long.  Since  this  heavy, 
melon-like  fruit  is  attached  in  clusters  to  the  trunk  and  larger 
branches  of  the  tree,  and  since  a  strong  wind  beats  the  immature 
pods  about  until  they  fall  useless  to  the  earth,  the  area  over 
which  cacao  can  be  a  profitable  crop  is  greatly  limited  by  the 
mere  existence  of  wind.  Where  strong  winds  blow,  as  occasion- 
ally in  the  Philippines  when  the  furious  tropic  typhoons  (hurri- 
canes) come,  the  cacao  tree  cannot  be  depended  on  as  a  source 
of  income,  although  it  has  long  been  grown  in  all  parts  of  these 
islands.  The  same  trouble  affects  most  of  the  West  Indies, 
where  cacao  can  be  grown  only  in  sheltered  valleys  protected 
from  the  wind,  as  in  rugged  parts  of  Trinidad,  Jamaica,  Grenada, 
St.  Lucia,  and  Dominica.  A  level  island,  like  Barbados,  exposed 
to  the  steady  trade  winds,  cannot  produce  it.  The  trees  begin 
to  bear  at  the  age  of  three  years,  but  do  not  reach  maturity 
until  they  are  ten  or  twelve  years  old;  they  may  then  bear  for 
thirty  or  forty  years  more.  They  are  usually  planted  about  two 
hundred  trees  to  the  acre,  and  careful  records  from  a  number  of 
plantations  in  Dutch  Guiana  show  that  the  yield  over  a  period 
of  several  years  was  477  pounds  of  beans  per  acre  per  year. 

IMPORTANCE   OF   THE   DOLDRUMS   OR   EQUATORIAL   CALMS 

Near  the  equator  in  all  continents  is  a  zone  of  calms,  called 
Doldrums,  lying  between  the  two  trade-wind  zones  and  drenched 
with  frequent  and  heavy  rains.  In  this  belt,  nowhere  more  than 


THE  CACAO  TREE 


507 


FIG.  128. — The  heavy  fruits  of  the  cacao  tree  cannot  mature  in  a  windy 
location.  They  are  so  close  to  the  stiff  stems  that  they  twist  off  instead 
of  swinging  with  the  swaying  branches  as  do  peaches  and  apples.  (Photo 
Walter  Baker  &  Co.) 


508  CHOCOLATE  AND  SPICES 

13°  north  or  south  of  the  equator,  are  the  most  important  cacao 
districts. 

Ecuador,  whose  name  means  equator,  was  long  the  leading 
cacao-shipping  country,  with  its  doldrum  rains  and  evergreen 
forests.  The  trees  here  find  every  condition  suited  to  them  and 
the  modified  jungle  easily  becomes  the  cacao  orchard.  Cacao 
is  the  chief  money  crop  of  this  part  of  the  country.  As  with 
the  banana,  plowing  is  not  necessary;  the  only  care  needed  is 
enough  chopping  to  prevent  the  smothering  of  the  young  trees. 

In  the  year  1900  it  was  estimated  that  six  hundred  square 
miles  of  land  yielded  all  the  sixty-seven  thousand  tons  of  cacao 
grown  in  the  world,  yet  Ecuador  alone  boasts  several  thousand 
square  miles  of  good  cacao  land.  But  this  in  turn  is  as  nothing 
in  comparison  to  the  hundreds  of  thousands  of  square  miles  of 
equally  good  cacao  land  in  the  Amazon  Valley  of  Brazil  and 
neighboring  countries.  However,  cacao  growing  is  not  a  com- 
fortable business,  and  it  takes  large  profits  to  tempt  men  to 
engage  in  it.  The  Ecuadorean  growers  all  desire  to  live  else- 
where. The  climate  suited  to  the  cacao  forest  is  unwholesome 
to  the  white  man,  and  the  jungles  swarm  with  dangerous 
animals,  poisonous  serpents,  and  pestiferous  insects.  Fevers 
are  common,  and  labor  naturally  is  scarce.  Although  sparsely 
settled,  the  low  plain  of  Ecuador  is  populous  in  comparison 
with  the  empty  jungles  of  the  Amazon  Valley,  of  which  Ecuador, 
Peru,  Colombia,  and  Bolivia  each  own  an  area  greater  than  the 
Pacific  Plain  of  Ecuador.  However,  the  scattered  settlements 
along  the  Amazon  have  recently  produced  as  much  cacao  as 
Ecuador  and  have  even  surpassed  her.  In  the  Amazon  Valley 
the  cacao  export  is  second  to  the  great  forest  product  of  rubber. 

The  British  colony  of  Trinidad,  below  the  hurricane-belt 
and  with  many  protected  hollows,  is  the  third  American  cacao- 
exporting  country,  while  Venezuela  and  San  Domingo  are  close 
rivals. 

A  little  cacao  is  grown  in  many  West  Indian  Islands  and 
throughout  Central  America,  chiefly  for  local  use,  although 
Guatemala  and  the  adjacent  parts  of  Mexico  claim  to  produce 
the  best  cacao  in  the  world.  Throughout  most  of  the  lands  where 
cacao  is  grown,  it  is  ground  in  the  homes  in  a  very  crude  way, 
for  family  use. 


SLAVE-GROWN  CACAO  509 

OLD  WORLD  CACAO  GROWING 

Cacao,  being  a  native  of  America  and  only  recently  of  im- 
portance in  commerce,  has  not  long  been  grown  in  the  Old 
World;  but  the  greater  labor  supply  of  the  Old  World  tropics 
bids  fair  to  make  those  regions  outstrip  America  in  the  export 
of  the  precious  beans.  The  tropic  islands  of  Sao  Thome  (or 
St.  Thomas)  and  Principe  (or  Prince's  Island)  lie  under  the 
equator  in  the  Gulf  of  Guinea,  and  though  they  have  less  than 
forty-five  thousand  people  (of  whom  ninety-six  per  cent,  are 
negroes),  and  have  an  area  of  but  three  hundred  and  sixty 
square  miles,  they  have  the  cacao  climate  and  a  fertile  volcanic 
soil.  In  the  year  1905,  this  tiny  Portuguese  colony  outstripped 
Ecuador  and  all  other  cacao-producing  countries.  This  output 
is  not  a  measure  of  superiority  of  resources;  for  slavery  still 
exists  there  and  the  taskmaster  can  make  the  native  work. 

The  recent  introduction  of  cacao  into  Ceylon  has  been  followed 
by  rapid  increase  of  production  there.  The  cacao  industry  may 
possibly  run  the  same  course  as  did  the  tea  industry,  which 
succeeded  coffee,  and  itself  became  unprofitable,  after  the  island 
had  taken  first  place  among  tea  exporters.  In  Java  and  in  the 
island  of  Reunion  also  the  climate  and  the  labor  supply  are 
favorable,  and  cacao  has  been  cultivated  on  a  small  scale.  Samoa 
and  other  Pacific  Isles  have  begun  to  produce  cacao,  but  the 
population  is  insufficient  for  the  production  of  a  large  surplus. 

METHOD   OP  PREPARATION   AND   USE  AS  FOOD 

When  the  cacao  pods  have  been  gathered,  they  are  cut  open, 
and  the  seeds,  which  are  covered  with  a  slimy  pulp,  are  put  in 
piles  to  ferment,  a  process  which  in  the  course  of  a  week  dis- 
poses of  the  pulpy  covering  of  the  seeds  and  cures  them  ready 
for  drying  and  shipment.  When  carefully  fermented  the  seeds 
are  twice  as  valuable  as  when  carelessly  done. 

Cacao  differs  from  tea  and  coffee  in  the  manner  of  its  use. 
The  latter  are  used  as  decoctions,  made  by  steeping  or  boiling 
the  tea  leaf  or  coffee  berry  in  water ;  afterwards  the  leaf  or  berry 
is  thrown  away.  All  processes  of  cacao  manufacture  merely 
grind  up  the  beans,  which  we  eat  as  solid  chocolate,  as  candy, 


510  CHOCOLATE  AND  SPICES 

or  drink  in  suspension  in  a  thick,  brown  liquid  made  by  mixing 
with  milk  or  water.  The  Chinese  cooks  in  the  Philippines  pound 
the  beans  in  mortars  and  flavor  them  with  spices  to  suit  individ- 
ual tastes.  In  the  Western  World  the  beans  are  taken  to  the  great 
factories  of  Holland,  England,  France,  Germany,  Switzerland,  or 
the  United  States,  where  expensive  machinery  pulverizes  the 
beans  to  great  fineness,  and  mixes  the  powder  with  sugar  and 
sometimes  with  milk  also.  This  need  of  milk  makes  it  necessary 
for  chocolate  factories  to  be  near  dairy  centers ;  and  it  has  even 
caused  the  removal  of  some  plants  to  country  towns  in  dairy 
districts,  as  in  eastern  United  States  and  Switzerland.  Switzer- 
land has  thirty  chocolate  factories  and  exports  thousands  of  tons, 
amounting  to  five  or  six  dollars  per  capita  for  the  Swiss  popu- 
lation. The  manufacture  of  chocolate  is  one  of  the  ways  in 
which  Switzerland  utilizes  her  mountain  pastures  through  her 
dairy  industry  to  the  fullest  extent. 

Breakfast  cocoa,  made  by  removing  the  nutritious  fat  of  the 
bean,  is  for  some  people  more  easily  digestible  than  is  chocolate. 
The  fat  is  valuable  in  medicine  and  has  the  peculiarity  of  never 
becoming  rancid  no  matter  how  long  it  is  kept.  Examination 
of  the  table  of  food  values  and  the  comparison  of  chocolate  with 
our  staple  articles  of  diet  will  show  its  great  value  as  food.  It 
is  several  times  as  nutritious  as  eggs  and  about  two  and  one-half 
times  as  nutritious  as  beef.  These  are  significant  facts  when 
taken  in  connection  with  the  relatively  declining  quantity  of 
beef,  the  increasing  quantity  of  cacao  (fifty  per  cent,  in  five 
years)  and  the  indefinite  room  for  expansion  in  its  production. 
As  the  cost  of  cacao  production  in  Ecuador  is  estimated  at  four 
cents  a  pound,  and  the  selling  price  is  several  times  that  figure, 
there  is  good  reason  to  expect  the  production  to  increase  in 
response  to  demand.  Chocolate  is  so  new  in  world  commerce 
that  its  cultivation  has  not  been  reduced  to  a  scientific  basis. 
Most  of  the  orchards  are  only  seedlings,  which  are  much  less 
productive  than  grafted  trees  of  selected  varieties;  the  latter 
are  only  now  coming  into  general  use  in  some  of  the  most  pro- 
gressive cacao  regions — Trinidad,  for  example,  where  the  British 
give  tropic  agriculture  the  benefit  of  science. 

Before  the  war  the  great  cacao  markets  were :  first,  Hamburg 
(Germany  is  a  great  cocoa  user) ;  second,  Havre;  third,  London; 


THE  VALUE  OF  SPICE  511 

and  fourth,  New  York;  from  these  cities  it  is  distributed  over 
the  Western  World. 


SPICES 

Spices  have  no  nutritive  value  whatever,  but  they  render  very 
great  service  to  food.  One  of  the  requirements  for  food  is  that 
it  shall  taste  good.  A  moment's  thought  will  show  us  that  most 
of  our  foods  are  composed  of  ingredients  which  in  themselves 
we  do  not  like — flour  and  water,  potatoes  unseasoned,  rice  un- 
seasoned— all  these  and  many  others  are  of  such  poor  natural 
flavor  that,  though  they  are  very  nutritious,  we  would  almost 
famish  before  we  could  force  down  enough  of  the  unseasoned 
stuff  to  nourish  our  bodies.  Therefore  we  resort  to  a  great 
variety  of  seasonings :  soy-bean  sauce  among  the  Orientals,  meat 
among  Americans,  mustard  among  the  British,  and  spices  in 
varying  quantities  and  number  throughout  almost  all  parts  of 
the  world,  especially  the  tropics.  Despite  their  lack  of  nutritive 
value,  spices  are  so  generally  prized  as  an  article  of  diet  that 
they  have  nearly  world-wide  distribution.  In  the  history  of  com- 
merce they  are  especially  interesting,  because  the  trade  in  spices 
long  dominated  the  commerce  between  the  East  and  the  West. 
They  were  for  centuries  almost  the  only  food  products  that  could 
be  transported  far.  They  were  of  greater  relative  importance 
in  ancient  and  mediaeval  than  in  modern  times,  because  the 
limited  variety  and  poor  taste  of  the  food  made  necessary  some- 
thing to  improve  its  flavor.  It  was  the  spice  trade  that  Columbus 
sought,  and  spice  trees  were  among  the  trees  early  introduced 
into  the  New  World. 

SPICES  THE  PRODUCT  OF  TROPIC   GARDEN   SPOTS  AND   HIVES  OF 
POPULATION 

Nearly  all  the  spices  with  the  exception  of  mustard  and  red 
pepper  grow  only  in  the  tropics.  The  trees  and  fruits  from 
which  they  are  produced  have  been  widely  disseminated  through- 
out the  hot  countries,  where  the  local  consumption  of  spice  is 
common.  However,  the  commercial  production  of  the  spice 
rarely  follows  the  mere  introduction  of  the  plant  for  local  use: 


512  CHOCOLATE  AND  SPICES 

for  nearly  all  the  spices  are  like  tea  in  requiring  tedious  and 
painstaking  labor  in  their  production.  As  a  result  their  export 
is  limited  to  centers  having  dense  population  and  abundant 
supply  of  labor.  All  Old  World  crops  came  to  the  New,  but  the 
export  of  spices  from  the  New  World  remains  insignificant.  Yet 
these  regions  dominate  in  the  export  of  grain  and  cattle,  products 
suited  to  regions  of  sparse  population. 

PEPPER 

This  is  the  most  important  of  all  spices.  It  is  prized  by  rich 
and  poor  in  both  tropic  and  temperate  latitudes.  In  quantity 
it  equals  all  other  spices  combined.  Singapore  is  the  leading 
port  for  the  shipment  of  black  and  white  pepper.  Most  of  this 
export  -is  assembled  from  Malacca,  Sumatra,  Borneo,  and  Siam, 
but  much  is  also  grown  about  Singapore.  It  is  significant  in 
this  connection  that  this  island  of  206  square  miles  supports 
348,000  people,  a  large  proportion  of  whom  are  Chinese  coolies, 
the  best  laborers  in  all  the  tropical  world.  With  them  are  many 
Europeans — a  combination  providing  both  workers  and  super- 
visors. In  Siam  also  are  at  least  two  hundred  thousand  Chinese, 
in  the  vicinity  of  Bangkok.  The  Chinese  coolies  are  also  respon- 
sible for  most  of  the  pepper  and  other  exports  of  Sumatra.  The 
Malabar  coast  of  India  is  another  pepper  country ;  a  little  is  also 
produced  in  the  West  Indies. 

Black  pepper  is  the  dried,  unripe  seed  of  a  climbing  vine,  some- 
times twenty  feet  high ;  the  white  pepper  is  the  same  seed  when 
riper  and  peeled.  The  common  method  of  growing  this  plant  is 
to  sow  the  seeds  in  fields  of  rice,  castor  beans,  and  other  tem- 
porary crops.  At  the  same  time  the  seeds  of  rapidly  growing 
trees  are  sown.  In  two  years  these  trees  are  cut  and  stuck  in 
the  ground  as  poles,  making  a  permanent  support  for  the  climb- 
ing pepper  vine,  which  yields  its  crop  in  about  two  years. 

Cayenne  pepper  or  chillies  is  an  entirely  different  plant, 
yielding  a  small  fruit  somewhat  like  the  peppers  commonly  seen 
in  markets  of  the  temperate  zone.  It  is  widely  grown  for  local 
use  throughout  tropic  Asia,  Africa,  and  South  America,  and 
takes  its  name  from  the  city  in  French  Guiana. 


MINOR  SPICES  513 

GINGER 

This,  the  second  spice  in  the  order  of  demand  in  the  market, 
is  the  underground  stem  of  a  reed-like  plant  growing  wild  in  the 
warm  parts  of  Asia.  It  is  one  of  the  most  widely  cultivated 
spices.  It  is  planted  like  any  common  crop,  dug  in  ten  months, 
and,  like  most  spices,  dried  in  the  sun.  The  best  preserved 
ginger  is  exported  from  South  America,  West  Africa,  Bengal, 
Cochin-China,  and,  in  small  amounts,  from  northern  Queensland. 

CINNAMON  AND   CASSIA 

Cinnamon  is  the  bark  from  the  young  shoots  of  a  small  ever- 
green tree  native  to  Ceylon  and  the  adjacent  coasts  of  India. 
The  cinnamon  industry  was  a  government  monopoly  in  Ceylon 
until  1883.  Since  that  time  it  has  been  introduced  into  Java, 
Cape  Verde,  Brazil,  West  Indies,  and  eastern  Africa.  It  also 
grows  in  Florida  and  Mexico,  but  almost  the  entire  supply  is  still 
produced  in  certain  districts  of  southeastern  Ceylon,  where  forty 
thousand  acres  of  it  are  under  cultivation.  This  island  has  the 
necessary  warmth,  moisture,  and  light  sandy  soil,  and  over  most 
of  its  territory  the  population  ranges  in  density  from  two  to 
six  hundred  per  square  mile,  thus  furnishing  the  labor  supply 
necessary  to  keep  the  cinnamon  trees  trimmed  to  a  low  bush-like 
form,  to  gather  the  long  shoots,  peel  the  bark  from  them  and  to 
dry  it  for  market.  The  flavor  of  cinnamon,  like  that  of  most 
spices,  is  due  to  an  essential  oil.  Cassia,  the  bark  of  a  somewhat 
similar  plant,  is  much  like  cinnamon  and  is  gathered  in  the  same 
way;  but  it  is  of  inferior  quality,  and  is  largely  used  to  adul- 
terate the  Ceylon  article.  Most  of  the  cassia  is  produced  in  the 
tropic  part  of  south  China,  and  the  exports,  amounting  to  a 
million  dollars  a  year,  are  all  sent  out  through  Hong-Kong. 

NUTMEGS  AND   MACE 

Mace  is  the  husk  that  encloses  the  nutmeg,  the  fruit  of  a  tree 
growing  wild  in  the  Banda  Islands  in  the  Dutch  East  Indies.  It 
requires  a  hot,  moist,  fully  tropical  climate  and  a  fertile,  well- 
drained  soil.  This  spice  tree,  with  the  clove,  was  long  a  monopoly 


514  CHOCOLATE  AND  SPICES 

of  the  Dutch  Government  in  the  Moluccas  or  Spice  Islands,  where 
the  Dutch  traders  in  the  days  of  their  commercial  supremacy 
preserved  their  spice  monopoly  by  sailing  the  eastern  archi- 
pelagoes and  cutting  down  nutmeg  trees  wherever  they  found 
them.  Nutmegs  are  now  chiefly  grown  for  export  in  Singapore, 
the  islands  of  Penang,  British  East  Indies  (107  square  miles, 
906  people  per  square  mile),  and  Grenada,  West  Indies  (270 
square  miles,  500  people  per  square  mile).  The  population  of 
Penang  is  largely  Chinese,  which  conduces  to  the  production  of 
nutmegs.  In  addition  to  nutmegs,  the  little  West  Indian  isle 
of  Grenada  exports  cacao  and  some  minor  spices.  The  nutmeg 
trees  do  not  produce  complete  blossoms,  some  being  male  and 
some  female.  They  do  not  bloom  until  they  are  six  or  seven 
years  old,  and  as  about  three-fourths  of  the  trees  are  males,  there 
is  great  waste  in  producing  them.  Recent  experiments,  how- 
ever, show  that  they  can  be  grafted  like  apple  trees  and  all  thus 
made  productive.  Connecticut  has  long  had  a  fame  (but  scarcely 
credit)  for  nutmegs  made  of  simple  home-grown  wood  and  sold 
to  the  unwary. 

CLOVES 

The  clove  is  the  dried,  unopened  flower  bud  of  a  tree  grown  to 
some  extent  in  Penang  but  most  largely  in  the  island  of  Zanzibar 
(640  square  miles)  on  the  eastern  coast  of  Africa,  where  the 
population  of  270  per  square  mile  has  a  considerable  sprinkling 
of  East  Indians,  Europeans,  and  Arabs,  who  are  the  employers 
of  labor.  The  oil  of  cloves  is  often  extracted  from  the  spice 
and  sold  as  a  separate  product. 


VANILLA 

Vanilla  differs  from  the  other  important  spices  in  being  a 
native  of  America  and  Mexico.  It  is  the  only  orchid  out  of 
many  thousands  that  produces  an  edible  product.  It  is  culti- 
vated to  a  small  extent  on  the  eastern  coast  of  Mexico,  but  it 
is  cultivated  chiefly  by  Oriental  labor  in  the  Indian  Ocean 
islands  of  Reunion,  Mauritius,  and  Seychelles.  These  islands 
resemble  other  spice  districts  in  population.  Reunion  (200 
people  per  square  mile)  has  a  considerable  sprinkling  of  Hindoos, 


MINOR  SPICES  515 

while  Mauritius  (500  per  square  mile)  has  an  important  element 
of  Chinese.  The  cultivation  of  vanilla  is  very  exacting.  It  is 
a  climbing  vine  and  must  grow  in  the  shady  and  humid  forests. 
Owing  to  a  peculiarity  of  the  blossom,  each  one  must  be  ferti- 
lized by  means  of  a  small  splinter  of  wood  in  the  hand  of  the 
attendant.  After  the  beans  are  ripe  they  must  be  most  care- 
fully dried  to  develop  a  perfect  flavor.  The  manufacture  of 
vanillin,  a  substitute  produced  from  sugar  by  electrolysis, 
threatens  this  industry,  which  is  one  of  the  most  unhealthful  of 
occupations. 

PIMENTO   OR   ALLSPICE 

This  fragrant  spice  is  the  small  dried  and  wrinkled  fruit  of  a 
beautiful  tree  which  grows  to  a  height  of  about  thirty  feet.  It 
is  a  native  of  tropical  America  and  is  cultivated  chiefly  in  the 
island  of  Jamaica  (population  over  150  per  square  mile  in  a 
mountainous  territory).  The  pimento  trees  commonly  grow  in 
pastures,  and  at  picking  time  small  black  boys  climb  the  tree 
and  break  off  the  fruiting  twigs.  Women  pick  them  up  from 
the  ground  and  attend  to  the  work  of  drying  and  preparing  the 
fruits  for  market. 

MUSTARD 

Mustard  is  the  most  popular  and  extensively  used  spice  in 
Great  Britain,  where  it  is  a  great  substitute  for  good  cookery,  as 
meat  is  in  America  and  pepper  is  in  Mexico.  It  is  also  quite 
generally  used  in  many  other  countries.  It  is  the  finely  pow- 
dered seed  of  a  plant  belonging  to  the  same  family  as  the  turnip 
and  beet.  The  production  of  this  seed  is  quite  widely  scattered 
and  seems  to  be  centered  in  localities  possessing  the  necessary 
foggy  climate  that  favors  its  best  development;  thus  certain 
foggy  districts  in  Russian  Poland  have  developed  a  relatively 
large  mustard  industry,  the  product  being  exported  through  the 
adjacent  German  port  of  Konigsberg.  In  Essex  and  Cambridge- 
shire, England,  and  in  Holland  are  other  mustard-growing  dis- 
tricts. The  United  States  has  one  successful  mustard  district 
near  Lompoc,  in  Santa  Barbara  County,  California,  in  a  valley 


516  CHOCOLATE  AND  SPICES 

opening  directly  to  the  Pacific,  whence  come  the  necessary  fogs 
at  the  ripening  time.  The  attempt  to  develop  mustard  produc- 
tion in  sunny  districts  east  of  the  California  Coast  Range  re- 
sulted in  failure,  although  the  crop  was  promising  up  to  within 
two  weeks  of  harvest.  Then  came  the  sunshiny  days  that  made 
the  mustard  too  strong  to  use. 

Mustard  of  an  inferior  quality  is  exported  from  Bombay, 
India,  where  the  climate  renders  the  seed  too  pungent  to  be 
generally  acceptable. 

The  amount  of  land  required  for  the  growth  of  the  world's 
supply  of  spices  is  so  small  that  the  danger  of  an  inadequate 
supply  due  to  land  shortage  is  about  as  remote  as  is  the  danger 
of  a  scarcity  of  salt. 


CHAPTER  XXV 
THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

IT  has  been  shown  in  connection  with  nearly  every  article  of 
diet  save  meat  that  we  can  easily  and  greatly  increase  the  sup- 
ply in  the  Western  World.  Nevertheless,  it  is  perhaps  worth 
while  to  consider  the  general  question  of  the  future  food 
supply,  because  it  is  so  generally  believed  that  the  chances 
of  making  a  living  are  growing  fewer,  that  the  resources  of 
the  world  for  each  man  are  less  than  they  were  a  few  years 
ago.  This  belief  is  not  founded  on  geographic  or  scientific 
fact ;  it  belongs  in  the  same  class  with  the  idea  in  the  mind  of  the 
horse  when  he  sees  a  bar  in  front  of  him  and  thinks  he  is 
fenced  in,  although  he  could  easily  tear  down  the  fence  with 
his  soft  nose.  If  resources  appear  to  be  growing  scarce,  the 
scarcity  is  due  to  the  shortcomings  of  our  suddenly  grown  finan- 
cial and  industrial  system,  and  from  our  quite  unscientific 
method  of  distributing  goods  and  wealth  and  holding  property. 
It  is  true  that  the  world  has  a  fixed  area,  and  that  the  number 
of  mankind,  despite  the  temporary  destruction  wrought  by  the 
Great  War,  is  increasing  very  rapidly;  but  while  the  area  is 
stationary  and  the  material  in  the  world  is  constant  in  quantity, 
the  usable  resources  are  also  rapidly  increasing.  A  resource  is 
something  which  may  be  turned  into  or  made  to  produce  a  useful 
commodity.  Science  every  day  enables  us  to  have  some  new 
commodity,  where  before  there  was  waste.  Because  of  this  crea- 
tion, there  is  good  reason  for  the  belief  that  the  available 
resources  of  the  world  are  increasing  quite  as  rapidly  as  the 
population,  and  that  they  will  continue  to  do  so  for  a  number 
of  generations,  if  man  devotes  himself  to  science  and  industry 
rather  than  to  war. 

The  complaint  of  lack  of  opportunity  is  old.  At  various  times 
in  the  world's  history  industry  has  apparently  caught  up  with 
resources,  so  that  there  actually  were  few  opportunities  avail- 
able under  existent  conditions.  Such  a  period  was  the  warlike 

517 


518  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

and  piratical  seventeenth  century.  As  commerce,  industry,  and 
the  desirable  and  available  world  then  existed,  there  was  little 
room  for  enterprise  for  the  worker  or  investment  for  the  capi- 
talist. Foreign  peoples  were  positively  or  potentially  hostile 
and,  therefore,  their  lands  were  unsafe.  The  sea  was  unsafe  for 
merchantmen ;  there  were  no  railroads ;  highways  were  bad ;  and 
idle  hands  could  often  find  no  employment.  Foreign  resources 
were  to  men  of  that  day  as  the  interior  of  Alaska,  or  the  forest 
along  the  coast  of  Hudson  Bay,  or  the  copper  deposits  of  central 
Africa  are  to  us  today.  The  people  of  Holland,  then  the  greatest 
financial  country  and  the  chief  money  lender  in  the  world,  found 
themselves  in  a  land  of  small  opportunity,  as  a  result  of  the 
great  scarcity  of  resources  to  develop.  There  were  few  new 
enterprises  in  which  they  could  invest  their  surplus;  hence, 
when  interest  rates  had  sunk  to  a  very  low  point,  they  speculated 
wildly  in  tulip  bulbs.  For  the  last  half-century,  on  the  other 
hand,  railroads  and  steamships  and  the  security  of  peace  have 
opened  almost  the  whole  world  to  commerce,  to  investment,  and 
to  settlement  by  industrial  people.  From  1885  to  1914  the  rapid 
progress  of  science,  showing  us  new  ways  to  utilize  raw  material, 
brought  the  world  into  a  period  of  really  rapidly  increasing 
resources  or  opportunities  for  industry — resources  that  needed 
developing  and  offered  employment  to  the  capital  and  labor  of  all 
nations. 

The  Dutch  investor  of  this  period  owned  railroads  in  the 
United  States,  plantations  in  Java,  nitrate  works  in  Chile ;  more- 
over the  rate  of  income  is  several  times  as  great  as  it  was  in 
the  seventeenth  century,  when  his  ancestors  gave  way  to  the 
tulip  mania.  An  example  of  the  internationalism  of  industry 
is  this  typical  enterprise  in  progress  in  Spain — an  Eng- 
lish corporation  financed  largely  by  French  and  Belgian  stock- 
holders, with  its  work  directed  chiefly  by  American  engi- 
neers, who  utilized  Spanish  workers  in  building  reservoirs  in 
the  defiles  along  the  southern  slopes  of  the  Pyrenees;  the  im- 
pounded waters  were  being  used  for  irrigation  and  for  the 
manufacture  of  hydro-electric  current,  the  one  to  make  dry 
valleys  rich  with  crops,  and  the  other  to  turn  the  wheels  and 
light  the  streets  in  Spanish  towns.  The  war  stopped  this  work 
for  a  time  almost  as  suddenly  as  it  stopped  the  import  trade  of 


WHAT  IS  DENSE  POPULATION?  519 

Germany ;  but  the  development  of  the  enterprise  resulted  in  more 
jobs  in  Spain,  more  people  and  more  homes  in  Spain,  more  crops 
in  Spain,  more  factory  products,  and  a  surplus  to  go  to  America 
to  pay  the  engineers,  to  England  to  pay  the  managers,  and  to 
France  and  Belgium  to  pay  the  stockholders. 


THE   DEGREE   OF   UTILIZATION   OF   RESOURCES 

The  question  naturally  arises:  When  are  resources  fully 
utilized,  and  when  is  a  country  fully  occupied?  It  is  difficult 
to  say  when  a  country  is  full  because  of  the  present  practice 
of  living  by  manufacturing  and  consuming  the  products  of  other 
localities.  The  standard  of  living  is  a  second  factor  making  it 
difficult  to  say  when  resources  are  fully  utilized.  If  the  people 
are  content  to  live  in  small  houses  rather  than  large,  to  eat 
grains,  vegetables,  and  beans  rather  than  meat  and  other  prod- 
ucts requiring  much  land,  then  the  population  can  be  large. 
Under  the  system  of  household  industry  many  localities  in 
Europe  and  Asia  are  populated  up  to  the  food-limit,  the  non- 
flesh  food-limit,  and  the  record  of  famine  in  India  shows  that 
country  to  be  far  beyond  the  food-limit  in  years  of  crop  failure. 
Millions  there  have  starved  beside  the  railway,  which  could  have 
brought  them  food  if  they  had  had  goods  or  money  with  which 
to  buy  it.  Yet  worse,  within  this  century  human  bones  have 
been  taken  to  the  Indian  fertilizer  factories  by  the  trainload, 
because  whole  populations  had  perished,  and  not  even  the  most 
distant  kin  of  the  dead  remained  on  earth  to  bury  them.  But 
this  devastation  was  due  rather  to  misplaced  effort  and  un- 
organized commerce  than  to  shortage  of  the  earth's  food  supply. 
Pigs  fattened  in  some  lands  while  people  starved  in  India  by  the 
million.  Belgium,  the  most  densely  peopled  of  Western  lands, 
has,  more  than  India,  passed  the  point  where  she  can  under  pres- 
ent standards  feed  her  people  from  her  own  lands ;  but  she  waa 
getting  along  very  well  until  the  war  disturbed  her  commerce, 
because  she  had  successfully  reached  the  stage  of  buying  raw 
material,  selling  manufactured  goods,  and  importing  food  with 
the  proceeds.  This  nation,  like  other  nations,  and  other  localities 
in  Europe  and  America,  has  become  like  a  city  in  its  economic 
life  and  was  steadily  increasing  in  population ;  with  the  steady 


520  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

increase  of  commercial  facilities,  it  showed  evidence  of  con- 
tinued growth  in  manufacture,  population,  and  dependence 
on  the  foreign  markets  and  on  foreign  raw  materials.  To  a 
large  number  of  people  in  Belgium,  their  land,  at  least  in  part, 
had  become  a  home  space,  their  sustenance  space  being  in  other 
lands. 

-  The  best  example  of  a  country  with  fully  developed  resources 
is  Japan,  with  meager  mineral  wealth,  a  steep  and  hilly  land, 
a  small  proportion  of  arable  land,  and  a  population  of  about 
four  persons  per  acre  of  tilled  land.  Until  the  recent  sudden 
shift  to  commerce,  this  population  supported  itself  almost  en- 
tirely by  agriculture,  with  an  average  area  of  2.6  acres  per  farm 
family.  On  this  slim  resource,  the  nation  had  maintained  its 
physical  and  intellectual  vigor  and  a  high  civilization;  but  it 
was  engaged  almost  exclusively  in  the  ultimate  phase  of  agri- 
culture, namely,  gardening  by  hand  labor,  and  using  only  the 
non-flesh  diet  with  the  addition  of  fish. 

Before  the  war  Japan  was  reclaiming  each  year  an  area  large 
enough  to  feed  over  two  hundred  thousand  people  and  new  lands 
to  be  reclaimed  will  provide  for  over  thirty  million  increase  of 
population  at  the  present  rate  of  four  people  per  acre. 

The  mystery  of  China's  support  of  their  millions  is  explained 
in  a  skilled  American  agricultural  observer's  account  of  a  visit  to 
the  farms  of  the  densely  peopled  province  of  Shantung.*  Every 
scrap  of  vegetable  matter  and  excrement  is  saved  and  returned 
to  the  fields,  which  yield  a  harvest  of  wheat  or  barley  in  June 
and  then,  with  the  aid  of  midsummer  monsoon  rains,  a  second 
crop  of  millet,  corn,  sweet  potatoes,  peanuts,  or  soy  beans.  The 
last  two  are  nitrogenous  meat  substitutes  and  help  to  explain 
the  observer's  statement  that  "One  of  the  farmers  in  this  prov- 
ince with  whom  we  talked  had  a  family  of  twelve  people  which 
he  was  maintaining  on  2.5  acres  of  good  farm  land,  keeping 
besides  one  milk  cow  (also  used  as  a  work  animal),  one  donkey, 
and  two  pigs.  The  crops  raised  were  wheat  or  barley,  millet, 
soy  beans,  and  sweet  potatoes."  At  this  astonishing  rate  one 
square  mile  could  maintain  3,072  persons,  256  cows,  256  donkeys, 
and  512  pigs.  It  would  be  impossible  to  find  an  American 
square  mile  that  could  feed,  under  American  methods,  the 

*King,  F.  H.:  Farmers  of  Forty  Centuries. 


UNUSED  LAND  IN  CHINA  521 

animals  alone,  to  say  nothing  of  the  people.  Japan,  and  ap- 
parently China,  are  now  entering  upon  the  second  stage  of 
development,  in  which  there  will  be  (as  now  in  Europe)  a  large 
manufacturing  population  added  to  the  agricultural  population. 

Not  all  of  China  is  so  densely  peopled.  These  conditions  pre- 
vail in  spots,  especially  on  alluvial  soils.  Unused  land  is  indi- 
cated by  the  reports  that  wild  boars  are  regularly  hunted  within 
five  miles  of  the  Yangtse-Kiang  at  Ching  Kiang,  the  first  port  up 
from  Shanghai ;  that,  within  the  same  distance  of  the  port  of  Fu 
Chow,  the  leopard  is  hunted  and  deer  skins  are  regularly  ex- 
ported from  Yangtse  ports ;  that  large  wild  hares  are  so  common 
along  the  Yangtse  that  the  European  resident  is  surfeited  with 
them. 

In  the  light  of  these  achievements  and  tendencies  of  the  yellow 
race  it  is  plain  that  even  they  have  by  no  means  caught  up  with 
the  resources  at  their  disposal.  Japan,  with  an  average  popu- 
lation of  350  per  square  mile,  probably  most  nearly  approaches 
the  limit;  in  Europe,  Italy,  with  an  average  population  of  326 
per  square  mile,  is  probably  the  nearest  Western  counterpart  of 
Japan.  A  part  of  Italian  agriculture  has  reached  the  ultimate 
garden  stage,  with  the  terracing  of  hillsides,  yet  work  animals  are 
still  used  in  most  parts  of  the  country.  As  in  Japan,  there  is 
in  Italy  great  scarcity  of  mineral  resources  and  there  was,  until 
a  recent  date,  only  a  little  manufacturing.  Unlike  Japan,  Italy 
has  a  dry  summer,  which  greatly  restricts  the  production  of  food 
for  the  support  of  a  large  agricultural  population,  so  that  Italy's 
high  per  cent,  of  usable  land  has  not  served  to  prevent  great 
poverty,  especially  in  the  southern  provinces.  As  a  consequence 
of  this  approach  to  the  agricultural  limit,  many  Italians  have 
emigrated  and  the  country  is  rapidly  entering  on  the  second  or 
manufacturing  stage,  having  increased  the  power  used  in  manu- 
facturing from  one  million  to  three  million  horsepower  within 
the  five-year  period  from  1899  to  1904.  Much  of  this  power 
is  derived  from  the  streams  that  rise  in  the  glaciers,  on  the 
southern  slopes  of  the  Alps.  The  Italians  use  the  suggestive 
name  of  "white  coal"  for  this  stream  energy,  which,  in  that 
country  without  coal,  serves  to  locate  most  of  the  Italian  manu- 
factures in  the  north.  Emigration  is  chiefly  from  the  non- 
manufacturing  south.  Italians  have  now  begun  to  utilize  to 


522  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

some  extent  volcanic  heat  as  a  source  of  power;  this  develop- 
ment may  give  a  new  outlook  to  southern  Italy,  where  in  the  past 
the  volcanoes  have  been  merely  terrors  desolating  fields  with 
lava  and  shaking  down  houses  with  their  earthquakes. 


UNUSED   AGRICULTURAL  RESOURCES   OF   THE   TEMPERATE   ZONES 

It  is  evident  that  there  are  two  standards  for  the  estimation 
of  resources:  the  Oriental  standard,  based  on  hand  labor  and 
largely  non-flesh  diet,  and  the  Western  standard,  based  on  work 
animals,  dairying  and  other  animal  industries,  and  a  meat  diet. 
The  descriptions  of  the  crowding  of  population  in  Japan,  Italy, 
and  Belgium,  may  lead  one  to  think  that  after  all  the  world  is 
getting  filled  up.  But  examination  of  a  map  of  the  world  will 
show  that  these  countries  occupy  a  very  small  fraction  of  the 
earth's  surface.  Judged  even  by  Western  standards,  the  tem- 
perate zones  have  large  unused  agricultural  resources.  Unused 
resources  should  be  classified  into  the  two  distinct  types: 
resources  unused  under  present  conditions,  and  resources  that 
science  may  develop  by  inventing  better  methods  than  those  now 
in  common  practice.  North  America,  the  south  temperate  zone, 
and  even  parts  of  Asia  are  relatively  unoccupied  lands  when 
compared  with  Italy,  China,  and  Japan.  So  little  is  farm  land 
utilized  and  sought  in  the  United  States  that  in  large  areas  east 
of  the  Alleghenies  it  is  a  common  saying  based  upon  fact,  that 
when  a  man  sells  a  farm  he  gives  away  either  the  value  of  the 
building  or  the  value  of  the  land,  for  the  price  obtained  is  often 
less  than  would  be  required  to  replace  the  buildings.  Very  little 
land  in  the  United  States  is  intensively  cultivated ;  moreover  the 
United  States  enjoys  an  advantage  unique  in  the  Western  World 
— a  vast  area  on  which  to  cultivate  the  great  gift  of  corn.  Over 
one  million  square  miles  of  the  country  can  produce  this  king  of 
forage  crops,  one  of  the  most  productive  and  easily  grown  of  all 
the  grains.  Furthermore,  this  grain  lends  itself  to  double  crop- 
ping, the  recourse  of  crowded  peoples.  In  Japan  and  China, 
and  wherever  possible  in  Italy,  the  land  is  made  to  yield  two 
crops  per  year,  winter  grain  between  October  and  June,  and 
rice  or  some  other  summer  crop  between  June  and  September. 
Similar  double  cropping,  now  almost  unknown  in  the  United 


OUR  ASTONISHING  SOUTHERN  STATES          528 

States,  can  be  practised,  if  need  be,  in  most  of  the  corn-belt. 
For  example,  as  far  north  as  New  Jersey  a  good  crop  of  peas 
can  be  harvested  in  May  and  June,  and  a  full  crop  of  young 
corn,  or  cotton  farther  south,  sown  between  the  rows,  will 
ripen  before  frost.  Even  a  third  crop  can  be  grown  and  agri- 
culture yet  maintain  its  Western  standard  through  machine  work 
and  large  area  per  man.  Cowpeas,  clover,  and  several  other 


FIG.  129. — Man  standing  in  a  cornfield  in  which  velvet  beans  have 
almost  completely  covered  the  corn.  This  bean  has  nitrogen-gathering 
nodules  as  big  as  the  end  of  your  finger.  Its  beans  and  leaves  are  both 
edible  by  hogs,  cattle,  and  horses.  The  cutting  of  the  corn  crop  in  the 
usual  way  is  impossible,  but  some  of  the  ears  may  be  snapped  ofT  and 
the  animals  turned  in  to  eat  all  they  can  and  trample  the  rest  underfoot 
to  the  great  enrichment  of  the  soil.  The  rapid  increase  in  the  growth 
of  this  bean  in  the  Southern  States  has  caused  its  acreage  in  the  United 
States  to  exceed  that  of  the  potato.  ( U.  S.  Dept.  Agr. ) 

leguminous  plants  will  thrive  with  the  corn  or  cotton,  enriching 
the  soil  with  their  roots,  feeding  animals  with  their  tops  and 
making  possible  a  wealth  of  agricultural  production  now  un- 
dreamed of  in  most  of  the  United  States  and  impassible  in  sunny 
Italy,  with  its  rainless  summer.  Yet  even  there,  over  three  hun- 
dred people  per  square  mile,  most  of  them  farmers,  succeed  in 
extracting  a  living  from  the  hilly  and  rocky  earth.  The  Ameri- 
can cotton-belt,  with  its  summer  rain,  with  an  area  six  times  the 


524  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

size  of  Italy,  and  now  supporting  only  from  twenty  to  fifty 
people  per  square  mile,  has  easily  twice  the  ability  of  Italy  to 
produce  food,  raiment,  and  timber,  per  square  mile  and  is  many 
fold  richer  in  minerals  and  waterpower. 

In  the  United  States  are  one  hundred  thousand  square  miles 
of  swamp  land,  scattered  among  the  old  glacial  lake  beds  in  the 
northeast,  in  tidal  marshes  along  the  Atlantic  Coast,  in  cane 
brakes  south  of  the  Chesapeake,  and  in  the  alluvial  lands  along 
the  Mississippi  and  other  rivers.  These  swamps  when  drained 
have  a  triple  advantage:  they  are  fertile,  they  have  a  good 
moisture  supply,  and  they  do  not  wash  in  heavy  rains.  They 
are  twice  as  productive  as  uplands,. and  are  at  the  present  time 
almost  untouched.  Moreover,  there  are  in  the  West  sixty  thou- 
sand square  miles  which  irrigation  can  make  almost  or  quite  as 
productive  as  the  reclaimed  marshes.  The  proposition  to  drain 
these  marshlands  of  the  South  systematically  immediately  after 
the  Great  War  is  one  of  the  most  sensible  projects  brought 
before  the  American  public  since  President  Roosevelt  and  Gifford 
Pinchot  initiated  the  movement  for  the  conservation  of  natural 
resources.  It  is  generally  expected  that  thousands  of  soldiers, 
for  years  freed  from  the  restrictions  of  city  life,  will  insist 
upon  the  freedom  of  out-of-doors.  This  unused  south  land  is 
the  greatest  American  reserve  of  cheap  unused  land,  and  the 
drainage  of  swamps  if  done  systematically  and  properly  has  the 
double  advantage  of  making  new  land  and  of  removing  the 
mosquito,  carrier  of  malaria,  perhaps  man 's  most  powerful  enemy 
on  the  face  of  this  earth.  Hitherto,  not  man,  but  the  insect,  has 
dominated  this  world,  square  mile  by  square  mile.  Man  has  used 
the  little  corners  where  the  mosquito  and  other  disease-bearing  in- 
sects do  not  thrive.  Where  they  do  thrive,  the  malaria,  the 
sleeping  sickness,  the  yellow  fever,  the  typhoid  fever,  and  the 
other  insect-borne  diseases  have  kept  man  in  the  background. 
The  place  to  begin  the  attack  upon  this  enemy  which  has  been 
more  potent  than  even  the  Germans  ever  threatened  to  be,  is  the 
swamp  lands  of  the  United  States,  from  which  can  be  made 
millions  of  farms  producing  indefinite  quantities  of  food — if  we 
want  the  food. 

Canada,  with  a  population  about  equal  to  that  of  Belgium, 
has  in  the  east  a  large  area  as  little  used  as  is  the  adjacent  part 


NORTHERN  RESOURCES  525 

of  the  United  States ;  and  the  vast  plains  west  of  Winnipeg  con- 
tain several  hundred  million  acres  of  fertile  lands  which  would 
support  scores,  if  not  hundreds,  of  millions  of  people  if  tilled 
like  similar  plains  in  Germany,  Denmark,  or  northern  Japan. 

Alaska,  to  the  surprise  of  Americans,  has  been  found  capable 
of  producing  luxuriant  grasses  and  ripened  grain,  and  if  need 
be,  can  easily  be  made  another  Finland,  which  supports  several 
million  agriculturists  with  millions  of  farm  animals  and  exports 
a  vast  amount  of  lumber. 

The  trans-Siberian  railway  has  opened  up  the  heart  of  a 
country  larger  than  Europe,  with  a  wide  belt  of  at  present 
unused  grain  lands,  almost  another  Canada,  which  may  possibly 
permit  the  Russian  realms  to  double  their  population  with  ease. 
Manchuria  and  Korea,  for  which  Japan  and  Russia  fought,  have 
unused  lands  several  times  greater  in  area  than  those  which 
support  the  fifty  million  Japanese,  but  these  lands  are  probably 
not  so  productive  as  those  of  Japan,  because  of  the  large  amount 
of  irrigation  in  Japan.  China,  with  a  population  that  taxes  the 
present  food-producing  resources  of  her  empire,  has  a  huge  labor 
supply,  and  untouched  mineral  resources  second  only  to  those  of 
the  United  States,  with  the  result  that  the  manufacturing  pos- 
sibilities are  more  stupendous  there  than  in  the  United  States. 
It  is  also  probably  true  that  China  herself  has  extensive  unused 
agricultural  resources.* 

In  western  Asia  the  era  of  railroad  building  has  been  barely 
begun  in  what  was  once  the  seat  of  empires  and  kingdoms — 
Asia  Minor,  Syria,  Mesopotamia,  and  Persia.  The  richest  part 
of  Asia  west  of  India  is  Mesopotamia,  the  valley  of  the  Tigris 
and  Euphrates  rivers,  the  seat  of  most  ancient  empire  and  most 
recent  war.  The  irrigated  soil  supported  dense  populations  of 
Assyrian  and  Babylonian  farmers  and  townsmen  from  before  the 
days  of  Abraham  until  after  the  fall  of  Rome.  For  centuries, 
cursed  by  Turkish  misrule,  it  lay  unused,  with  abandoned  irriga- 
tion ditches  reaching  through  several  million  acres  of  alluvial 

*  In  spite  of  the  popular  impression  that  China  is  overcrowded  the  coun- 
try can  support  twice  its  present  population,  and  there  is  plenty  of  room 
in  China  for  the  business  men  of  every  nation  with  no  necessity  for  old- 
fashioned  competition  in  which  energy  is  wasted  in  trying  to  keep  the 
other  fellow  out,  according  to  Dr.  Paul  S.  ReinBch,  American  minister  to 
China,  who  recently  attended  a  luncheon  given  in  his  honor  by  the  Com- 
mercial Club  of  San  Francisco.— From  Oriental  Neve*  and  Comment,  1918. 


526  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

soil.  But  there  is  every  prospect  that,  with  the  incalculable 
stimulus  of  order,  and  under  development  by  European  and 
American  engineers  and  capitalists,  it  will  again  become  the 
seat  of  great  agricultural  production  and  a  large  population. 
The  British  took  possession  of  Bagdad  in  March,  1917,  and  im- 
mediately set  the  natives  to  work  on  canal  digging.  In  the 
spring  of  1918,  the  American  consul  at  Bagdad  reported  that  the 
area  planted  in  that  region  was  eight  times  that  of  the  preceding 
year  and  four  times  that  of  the  best  recent  previous  year. 

In  Argentina  and  Uruguay  in  South  America,  in  South  Africa, 
in  Australia,  and  in  New  Zealand,  the  south  temperate  zone  has 
millions  of  square  miles  of  land,  with  a  total  population  less  than 
twice  that  of  Holland  and  Belgium.  These  large  territories,  while 
greatly  handicapped  by  aridity,  have  a  wholesome  and  moder- 
ately invigorating  climate,  and  resources  that  will  permit  a 
many-fold  increase  in  the  population  based  on  a  many-fold  in- 
crease in  the  production  of  grain,  meat,  dairy  products,  and 
fruits.  Moreover,  as  in  most  of  the  world,  their  mineral  resources 
are  but  slightly  developed. 

THE   DESIRE   FOR   IMMIGRANTS 

It  is  true  that  in  China,  Japan,  and  India,  the  people  lament 
that  their  numbers  are  so  great — a  state  of  mind  strikingly  dif- 
ferent from  that  of  the  innumerable  boaster  clubs  organized  in 
many  states,  provinces,  and  countries  of  the  New  "World  for  the 
sole  purpose  of  attracting  more  people  to  come  and  settle  in 
their  localities.  Aware  of  the  numerous  unused  resources  of  the 
temperate  zones,  we  are  in  a  position  to  understand  the  great 
efforts  that  have  been  made  by  many  countries  with  unoccupied 
and  undeveloped  lands  to  induce  immigration  from  the  densely 
populated  countries.  For  decades  the  United  States  gave  away 
one  hundred  and  sixty  acres  of  land  to  any  man  of  any  color 
or  nation  who  would  come  and  live  on  it.  At  the  present  time 
many  American  states,  especially  those  in  the  West  and  South, 
but  also  those  in  the  Northeast,  are  making  an  organized  and 
persistent  effort  to  spread  knowledge  of  their  unused  lands  and 
to  attract  settlers.  For  years  Canada  has  been  expensively 
advertising  in  many  countries  the  fact  that  she,  too,  has  good 


AN  AGE  OF  SCIENCE  327 

farms  to  give  away  to  all  settlers.  Australia,  Chile,  and  Argen- 
tina have  actually  lent  immigrants  money  and  assisted  in  their 
transportation  to  the  free  lands  which  were  to  be  their  new 
homes.  While  much  of  this  effort  has  been  due  to  the  desire  for 
increase  of  wealth,  which  the  immigrant  would  give  with  his 
capital  and  produce  by  his  labor,  there  has  been  another  good 
reason.  In  many  localities,  covering  large  areas  of  the  Western 
World,  the  population  has  been  too  sparse  to  support  a  good, 
well-organized,  well-financed  society  with  the  necessary  schools, 
churches,  and  other  institutions. 

SCIENCE  CREATES   RESOURCES 

Supplementing  all  these  resources,  usable  with  our  present 
knowledge,  but  unused,  comes  the  development  of  science.  She 
is  yet  young  and  fecund.  Many  are  the  new  creations  men  of 
science  have  wrought  since  their  wits  have  been  cudgeled  by  the 
pressing  needs  of  the  war:  the  submarine,  the  flying  machine, 
the  tank,  great  discoveries  in  medicine,  and  industrial  substitu 
tions  without  number.  All  these  represent  the  work  of  a  com- 
paratively small  number  of  our  population  in  a  few  short  years. 
There  is  nothing  unusual  about  it.  It  is  but  the  beginning. 
The  war  has  shown  us  the  importance  of  science.  Now  that  the 
war  is  over  we  must  seriously  consider  the  problem  of  education 
and  the  helping  of  men  to  make  a  living  and  to  live.  More 
than  two  blades  of  grass  will  grow  where  one  grew  before,  and 
clusters  of  grass  will  grow  where  there  was  none.  Our  new 
knowledge,  applicable  alike  to  agriculture,  manufacture,  mining, 
and  transportation,  gives  us  many  new  facilities  for  utilizing 
resources  hitherto  unavailable.  Science,  therefore,  may  be  said 
to  create  resources  of  great  benefit  to  every  land  from  empty 
Australia  to  the  teeming  Orient,  which  still  depends  on  human 
muscle  for  bearing  burdens  and  running  the  loom. 

One  of  these  great  creators  of  resource  is  chemistry.  Man's 
economic  possibilities  have  already  been  increased  by  its  dis- 
coveries, and  doubtless  great  economic  powers  are  yet  to  come 
from  the  laboratory.  Suggestive  of  progress  due  to  this  agency 
is  the  synthetic  method  of  making  indigo,  which  is  now  almost 
entirely  produced  from  retorts  distilling  coal  tar  instead  of  from 


528  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

the  vats  in  which  the  people  of  India  and  Central  America 
ferment  the  stalks  of  the  indigo  plant.  The  indigo  fields  are 
now  free  to  produce  food.  After  the  existence  of  large  areas  of 
unused  land  has  been  demonstrated,  the  question  arises:  What 
will  this  land  yield?  How  many  people  will  it  feed?  This 
question  is  bound  up  with  that  of  fertility  and  artificial  fer- 
tilizer. By  studying  this  subject  the  chemist  has  done  much 
and  will  do  much  more  to  increase  the  food  supply  and  thereby 
the  numbers  of  men  who  may  inhabit  this  earth.  One  of  the 
war-time  improvements  that  will  have  a  very  far-reaching  effect 
on  the  world's  food  supply  is  the  manufacture  of  nitrogenous 
fertilizers.  A  few  years  ago,  the  -supply  seemed  to  be  quite 
definitely  limited,  with  famine  not  far  away.  In  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century  commercial  fertilizer  began  with 
guano,  the  accumulated  dried  droppings  of  birds  which  lived 
upon  almost  rainless  islands  off  the  coast  of  Chile  and  Peru.  In 
a  few  decades  this  surface  deposit  of  centuries  was  exhausted. 
Then  we  discovered  the  nitrate  fields  of  Chile,  which  will  last  us 
for  a  few  decades.  But  before  this  product  was  nearly  ex- 
hausted, man's  possible  alarm  was  postponed  by  the  chemists, 
who  discovered  a  way  to  make  sulphate  of  ammonia  out  of  coal 
tar.  A  ton  of  coal,  distilled  in  a  modern  by-product  coke  oven, 
makes  a  good  many  gallons  of  ammonia.  From  this  rival  source 
of  nitrogen  v/ere  produced  210,000  tons  of  sulphate  of  ammonia 
in  1890 ;  500,000  tons  in  1900 ;  1,300,000  tons  in  1912.  However, 
the  supply  depends  upon  coal,  which  is  itself  quite  definitely 
limited  in  amount.  This  limitation  does  not  apply  to  the  most 
recent  supply  of  nitrogen  that  the  scientists  have  opened  to  us — 
air  nitrates. 

Mechanical  power  in  the  form  of  electric  current  sending  its 
white-hot  spark  through  a  little  box  containing  limestone  and  a 
few  other  cheap  materials  unites  them  with  the  unlimited  nitro- 
gen of  the  ever-abundant  air.  We  now  know  that  so  long  as 
sources  of  power  remain  and  ledges  of  limestone  exist,  that  is, 
for  millions  of  years,  man  can  have  all  the  nitrogenous  fertilizer 
he  wants.  One  of  the  important  means  of  doubling  yields,  par- 
ticularly yields  of  breadstuffs,  is  thus  at  his  command. 

Plants  need  many  substances,  especially  carbon,  oxygen,  nitro- 
gen, phosphorus,  potash,  and  lime.  Some  of  these  are  secured 


COMMERCIAL  FERTILIZER  529 

abundantly  from  the  air,  or  are  to  be  found  in  the  soil  so 
commonly  and  plentifully  that  they  rarely  need  to  be  applied. 
But  three  main  substances  are  so  scarce  that  they  are  the  chief 
constituents  of  artificial  fertilizer:  namely,  phosphorus,  potash, 
and  nitrogen.  When  a  few  hundred  pounds  of  these  substances 
have  been  applied  to  an  acre  of  the  poorest  ground,  if  the  climate 
is  favorable,  magnificent  crops  of  sturdy  and  productive  plants 
promptly  arise. 

In  the  latter  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  the  commercial 
fertilizer  industry  was  firmly  established.  It  has  continued  to 
spread  rapidly  since  1900  and  is  now  an  accepted  feature  of  the 
agriculture  of  the  Western  World.  Without  it  man  had  fared 
poorly  in  times  past.  Undoubtedly  one  of  the  reasons  for  the 
fall  of  many  ancient  empires  was  the  exhaustion  of  the  soil 
because  of  the  continuous  growth  of  crops  and  the  carrying  away 
of  plant  food  faster  than  it  was  produced  by  nature,  until  the 
land  became  so  unproductive  that  it  was  not  worth  the  farmer's 
time  to  cultivate  it.  This  condition  is  to  be  found  in  areas 
around  the  Mediterranean  basin  at  this  day.  Dense  population 
has  been  maintained  in  a  few  spots  of  great  richness,  especially 
on  alluvial  soil.  A  good  example  is  Egypt,  where  the  River  Nile 
has  continually  enriched  its  valley  for  thousands  of  years  with 
layers  of  flood  mud.  China  and  Japan  have  maintained  their 
great  populations  by  scientifically  and  laboriously  putting  back 
upon  the  soil  everything  taken  from  it.  In  some  parts  of  the 
Western  World  careful  systems  of  animal  agriculture  have  ap- 
proximated thus  method.  These  systems  have  provided  for  the 
return  of  the  excrements  of  the  animals,  which,  with  the  slow 
release  of  plant  food  from  the  mineral  earth,  has  sufficed  to 
maintain  fertility  at  a  fair  degree  of  productivity.  But  the  new 
opportunity  to  go  to  the  railroad  station  and  bring  home  a  few 
sacks  of  phosphate,  potash,  and  nitrogen,  has  given  man  a  new 
hold  upon  the  earth — as  long  as  the  supply  of  fertilizer  holds 
out.  Hence  arises  an  important  question  as  to  our  ultimate 
resources  of  fertilizer. 

PHOSPHATE 

Phosphorus  is  perhaps  the  least  abundant  of  the  fertilizing 
substances.  At  present  it  is  the  cheapest  element  of  our  supply 


530  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

of  fertilizer,  because  it  is  temporarily  abundant  and  is  easy  to 
procure  while  the  supply  lasts.  For  thirty  years  the  chief  source 
has  been  the  fossil  deposits  near  the  surface  in  South  Carolina, 
Florida,  Tennessee,  parts  of  Tunis,  and  elsewhere.  The  phos- 
phorus famine  which  seemed  imminent  a  decade  ago  has  been 
postponed  for  several  centuries  by  the  discovery  of  very  large 
deposits  in  the  Rocky  Mountain  region,  especially  of  those  near 
Yellowstone  Park.  Probably  many  more  will  be  found  when  the 
world  has  been  thoroughly  investigated ;  and  it  is  reasonable  to 
hope  that  before  this  supply,  sufficient  for  several  centuries,  has 
been  exhausted,  man  will  know  enough  to  extract  phosphorus 
from  the  sea,  where  the  very  small  percentage  in  solution  makes 
a  total  quantity  inexhaustible,  as  far  as  man's  needs  are  con- 
cerned. 

POTASH 

The  scientist  is  similarly  challenged  to  increase  the  supply  of 
potash ;  the  need  became  very  acute  in  all  Allied  countries  be- 
tween 1915  and  1918.  The  world's  commercial  supply  hitherto  has 
been  drawn  almost  exclusively  from  Germany,  where  at  Strass- 
furt  on  the  Elbe  2,000  tons  were  produced  in  1881,  and  11,000,- 
000  in  1912.  Thence  it  was  distributed  by  the  hundreds  of 
thousands  of  tons  among  the  leading  countries.  A  very  dili- 
gent search  in  the  United  States  has  revealed  no  abundant 
supply  of  potash  equal  to  that  of  Germany,  although  some  js 
found  in  lakes  in  California  and  Nebraska  and  the  kelp  beds 
on  the  Pacific  Coast  contain  a  supply  from  which  we  could  get 
enough  to  use  (at  a  high  price)  if  we  were  permanently  com- 
pelled to  depend  upon  it.  However,  industry  hesitated  for  a 
time  to  embark  largely  on  such  an  enterprise  because  of  the  rea- 
sonable certainty  that  at  the  end  of  the  war  the  old  cheap 
sources  in  Germany  would  again  be  opened  and  the  more  expen- 
sive hothouse  industry  would  perish.  As  the  war  scarcity  in- 
creased and  the  price  of  commercial  potash  rose  from  $45  to 
$600  a  ton,  numerous  attempts  were  made  to  secure  it — from 
Searles  Lake  in  the  California  desert,  from  many  small  lakes 
in  the  Sand  Hills  of  Nebraska,  from  the  green  sands  of  New 
Jersey,  from  shale  rocks  in  Georgia,  from  the  dust  of  blast 


POWER,  THE  PARTNER  OF  SOIL  531 

furnaces  and  cement  mills,  from  alunite  in  Utah,  from  ancient 
lava  in  Wyoming.  There  are  whole  mountains  of  rock  con- 
taining about  8  per  cent,  of  potash.  Heat  will  release  it.  America 
could  make  its  own  potash  if  necessary,  but  it  would  cost  much 
more  than  digging  it  in  Germany,  Alsace,  or  Spain  where  large 
deposits  are  recently  reported.  Italy  has  vast  stores  of  it  in  her 
lavas,  but  it  would  take  coal  (at  present)  to  get  it. 


NITROGEN 

Nitrogen  has  for  many  years  been  the  most  expensive  and  the 
most  generally  needed  of  the  artificial  fertilizers,  although  in 
nature  it  is  so  abundant,  composing  about  four-fifths  of  the  air. 

OUR   RESOURCES   FOR   MECHANICAL   POWER 

The  possibility  of  producing  food  indirectly  by  the  manu- 
facture of  air  nitrates  by  means  of  the  whirling  wheels  of 
the  dynamo,  gives  added  importance  to  artificial  power,  that 
great  primal  necessity  of  manufacture,  trade,  and  transport. 
Beyond  any  doubt  the  most  important  single  resource  for 
the  maintenance  of  existing  civilization  is  the  power  to  drive 
machinery.  At  the  present  time  we  are  depending  largely  on 
coal,  which,  being  a  mineral,  is  one  of  our  surely  perishable 
resources.  Unlike  the  field,  which  may  yield  thousands  of  crops, 
or  the  forests,  which  may  perpetually  yield  timber, -or  the  water- 
fall, which  will  run  on  for  ages,  coal,  once  used,  is  gone  forever. 
This  most  important  mineral  has  recently  had  its  economic  value 
doubled  by  the  discovery  of  the  means  of  making  gas  by  a 
method  which  utilizes  inferior  coal  or  peat  itself,  for  the  making 
of  gas  to  run  gas  engines — a  very  efficient  means  of  getting 
power  from  fuel.  The  production  of  one  horsepower  in  one  hour 
from  one  pound  of  coal  is  a  common  achievement. 

The  new  turbine  water  wheel  and  rapidly  developing  skill  in 
transmitting  power  by  electricity  are  introducing  a  water-power 
era  in  places  where  coal  is  costly.  The  full  utilization  of  a 
power  that  now  flows  uselessly  to  the  sea,  might  enable  many 
now  sparsely  peopled  parts  of  the  world  to  maintain  large 
manufacturing  populations — provided  food  supply  is  available 


532  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

and  the  falls  can  help  make  the  fertilizer  needed  to  produce 
food  for  the  manufacturing  populations.  An  example  of  dis- 
tant unused  water-power  is  the  Congo  River  of  west  Africa, 
which  rivals  Niagara  by  tumbling  down  to  the  sea  in  many 
cataracts.  Engineers  have  already  been  seriously  discussing 
the  carrying  of  power  seven  hundred  miles  from  the  falls  of 
Zambezi  to  the  mines  of  Johannesburg  in  the  Transvaal,  and 
to  the  diamond  mines  of  Kimberley.  The  plateaus  of  Brazil 
and  the  slopes  of  the  Andes  also  have  enormous  unused  water 
power. 

Moreover,  in  many  parts  of  the  world  the  wind  blows  with 
great  force  and  regularity.  Wind  has  long  been  used  as  a  source 
of  industrial  power  in  Holland ;  and  modern  windmills,  if  we 
choose  to  use  them,  may  be  made  much  more  efficient  than  those 
of  the  picturesque  Dutch  pattern. 

The  success  of  the  Italian  engineer,  Ginori  Conti,  in  developing 
during  the  period  of  the  Great  War  no  less  than  13,500  horse- 
power of  electric  energy  from  steam  engines  driven  by  the  heat 
from  the  boiling  volcanic  springs  of  Tuscany  is  very  suggestive 
of  vast  power  developments  that  may  take  place  in  the  widely 
scattered  regions  of  geysers,  hot  springs,  and  volcanoes.  Equally 
suggestive  is  the  plan  recently  put  forward  *  by  engineers  to 
utilize  several  million  square  miles  of  tropic  sea,  which  has  a 
surface  temperature  of  about  80°,  and  a  half-mile  down  a  tem- 
perature of  40°.  The  surface  is  kept  at  80°  by  the  continuous 
rays  of  the  tropic  sun,  and  the  bottom  is  kept  at  40°  by  the 
continuous  inflow  of  water  from  the  region  of  roaring  polar 
winds.  The  engineers  find  that  ether  in  an  engine  will  boil 
and  turn  into  vapor  (like  steam),  if  the  boiler  tubes  are  in  the 
sea-water  having  a  temperature  of  80°,  and  will  condense  at  the 
other  end  of  the  engine  if  the  condenser  tubes  are  in  the  cold 
water  having  a  temperature  of  40°  ;  this  cold  water  can  easily 
be  brought  up  from  the  sea  a  half-mile  below  the  surface.  We 
may  picture  power-plants  floating  in  the  warm  Atlantic — great 
floating  islands  of  reinforced  concrete  which  will  have  a  per- 
manency that  will  put  to  shame  the  coal  mine  and  almost 
Niagara  itself,  for  they  have  but  to  pump  up  a  stream  from  the 
inexhaustible  cold  sea  beneath  them  in  order  to  keep  their  boilers 

*  Engineering  News,  August,  1913. 


THE  SEA,  A  MINE  OF  POWER  533 

stoked.  Concrete  ships  with  storage  batteries  may  possibly  tie 
up  at  such  a  plant  to  be  loaded  with  energy,  part  of  which  will 
carry  them  to  the  wharves  of  New  Orleans,  Philadelphia,  or 
Stockholm ;  there,  when  they  have  been  attached  to  the  trans- 
mission wires  of  the  city  distributing  system,  they  will  run  the 
city's  wheels  and  lights,  cook  its  food,  and  perhaps  heat  its 
rooms. 

There  is  a  place  on  the  shore  of  St.  Croix,  one  of  the  Virgin 
Islands,  recently  purchased  by  the  United  States,  where  the 
shore  falls  away  so  steeply  (45°)  that  power  plants  erected  on 
the  shore  could  probably  get  both  warm  and  cold  water  wiith  ease. 

There  exists  a  possible  source  of  power  which  is  available  anywhere 
and  which  can  be  utilized  whenever  the  art  of  developing  power  from 
a  low-temperature  drop  is  sufficiently  developed.  We  refer  to  the  heat 
of  the  earth's  interior.  It  is  already  practicable  to  sink  bore-holes  and 
mine-shafts  to  a  depth  of  two  miles  or  more.  By  circulating  water 
down  such  shafts  and  back  to  the  surface,  the  heat  of  the  deep  strata 
can  be  brought  to  the  surface.  It  may  be  said  that  by  the  constant  cir- 
culation of  cool  water  down  the  shaft  and  back  the  deep  strata  would 
eventually  have  their  temperature  reduced  so  that  the  deposit  of  heat 
would  eventually  be  "  worked  out "  like  a  coal-mine. 

The  enormous  bulk  and  weight  of  the  deep-lying  strata,  however, 
which  would  slowly  conduct  their  heat  to  the  flowing  stream,  would 
probably  make  the  life  of  such  a  source  of  heat  very  long. 

It  is  interesting  to  draw  a  parallel  between  the  development  of  the 
natural  resources  of  the  earth  in  minerals  and  in  power.  As  is  well 
known,  in  the  development  of  the  mineral  industry  it  has  been  the 
rich,  high-grade  deposits  which  first  attracted  attention  and  have  first 
been  commercially  worked.  It  was  not  until  the  best  of  these  were 
exhausted,  and  the  product  became  increasingly  valuable,  that  means 
were  found  to  work  the  vastly  larger  deposits  of  low-grade  ores 
which  were  formerly  considered  wholly  worthless.  So  in  the  art  of 
power  development  Man  has  hitherto  only  made  use  for  power  develop- 
ment by  heat-engines  of  the  high-grade  drops  in  temperature  pro- 
duced by  the  combustion  of  coal,  oils,  and  other  fuel.* 

One  more  power  source  is  already  feasible  in  some  places.  All 
other  sources  of  power  are  insignificant  by  comparison  with  the 
great  source — the  direct  rays  of  the  sun,  which  hurl  into  nine 
thousand  square  miles  of  Egypt  enough  power  to  replace  all 
the  engines  and  waterwheels  in  the  world.  Three  different  types 
of  mechanism  have  already  utilized  this  power  to  a  small  extent, 

*  "  Low-grade  Power-Sources,"  Engineering  News,  August  6,  1913. 


534  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

and  we  may  some  day  find  the  sun  to  be  the  most  accessible  of 
all  sources  of  power.  The  possibility  of  making  sun  power  more 
available  than  the  already  existing  forms  rouses  interesting 
speculation  as  to  where  would  be  the  natural  seats  of  empire,  if 
the  best  sources  of  power  were  within  two  or  four  hundred 
miles  of  cloudless  desert. 

Altogether  there  is  good  reason  to  think  that  man  is  coming 
into  an  inheritance  of  an  abundance  of  power  to  run  his  wheels, 
to  make  nitrogen  for  his  fields,  and  develop  for  the  future  an 
agriculture  of  which  we  in  the  present  know  but  little. 

It  therefore  appears  that  in  the  twentieth  century  the  human 
race  is  looking  out  on  a  new  world — a  newer  world  in  the 
economic  sense  than  the  one  Columbus  showed  to  the  sixteenth 
century — the  world  created  by  scientific  industry,  speedy  trans- 
portation, and  rapidly  improving  mechanism.  Old  standards 
for  measuring  the  value  of  land  to  man  have  been  replaced ;  the 
new  scientific  discoveries  are  bringing  about  changes  by  a  series 
of  improvements  more  rapid  than  any  that  we  have  ever  before 
experienced ;  and  the  end  is  not  in  sight,  if  we  can  only  restrain 
the  lust  of  war,  and  devote  our  talents  to  the  utilization  of  the 
earth  rather  than  to  the  destruction  of  the  handiwork  of  God 
and  man. 

An  abundance  of  nitrogenous  fertilizer  is  by  no  means  the  only 
contribution  that  power  may  make  to  man 's  food  supply.  Elec- 
tric current  has  been  used  to  stimulate  plant  growth,  and  experi- 
ments carried  on  in  England  have  had  results  little  short  of 
marvelous.  Adjacent  plots  in  a  Liverpool  park  in  1917  were 
treated  alike  in  every  respect  except  that  over  one  came  a  current 
of  electricity  from  the  air,  somewhat  after  the  fashion  of  a 
shower  of  rain.  In  comparison  with  the  produce  of  the  plot 
which  was  not  so  treated,  onions  in  this  plot  increased  633  per 
cent.,  sugar  beets  467  per  cent.,  peas  29  per  cent.,  barley  30  per 
cent.,  oats  39  per  cent,  potatoes  (one  variety)  63  per  cent.  It 
is  too  early  to  make  any  prophecy  on  the  basis  of  these  astonish- 
ing results,  but  if  cheap  power  can  first  make  plant  food  and 
then  make  plants  eat  it  and  increase  several  times  in  size,  it  is 
easy  to  see  that  we  may  have  several-fold  increase  of  the  total 
food  supply. 

Power  may  also  be  used  to  run  farm  machinery  in  the  near 


POWER  ON  THE  FARM  535 

future,  when  we  may  reasonably  expect  good  country  districts 
to  be  wired  with  power  lines  as  they  now  are  with  telephone 
lines.  Every  farm  might  then  have  its  own  power,  and  it  would 
he  the  rule  rather  than  the  exception  for  the  electric  current  to 
milk  the  cows.  It  is  by  no  means  impossible  that  we  may  invent 
some  form  of  electric  transmission  that  will  enable  the  plowing 
and  harrowing  as  well  as  the  heavy  hauling  to  be  done  by  elec- 
tricity rather  than  by  gasoline,  kerosene,  or  coal  gas. 


NEW    RESOURCES   IN    INDUSTRY 

Agriculture  is  the  mother  of  industry.  By  the  creation  of  new 
resources  in  agriculture,  science  can  make  it  possible  for  the  eartfc 
to  support  larger  numbers  of  men.  Population  is  limited  by  the 
supply  of  food.  Increase  of  the  food  supply  alone  will  permit 
the  number  of  men  to  increase  by  the  billion.  For  this  reason 
agriculture  outranks  all  other  industries  in  importance. 

In  the  utilization  of  the  earth  for  agriculture,  we  have,  down 
to  the  latter  part  of  the  nineteenth  century,  used  a  haphazard 
method.  Our  concern  for  the  supply  of  the  future  resembled 
the  attitude  of  the  Indian  who,  from  a  herd  of  buffaloes,  killed 
a  hundred  and  carried  off  only  their  tongues.  Science  is  now 
beginning  to  examine  all  parts  of  the  earth  with  reference  to 
their  usefulness,  as  the  savers  of  by-products  in  a  modern 
slaughter-house  examine  and  use  every  part  of  an  ox. 

The  essential  feature  of  soil,  for  purposes  of  agriculture,  is 
fertility.  How  to  unlock  the  resources  of  the  earth  is  man's 
problem.  The  key  is  vegetation,  and  vegetation  requires  first, 
heat;  second,  light;  and  third,  moisture.  Agriculture  has  thus 
far  been  little  practised  where  the  land  can  not  be  plowed.  The 
insistence  in  the  past  on  arability  as  a  fourth  requirement  has 
caused  vast  resources  of  fertility,  heat,  and  moisture  to  be  prac- 
tically unused,  and,  by  leading  to  erosion,  plowing  has  caused 
soil  sufficient  for  kingdoms  to  be  barbarously  wasted  and  de- 
stroyed, to  the  permanent  and  profound  injury  of  the  earth  as 
a  home  for  man. 

The  barriers  that  have  prevented  men,  especially  in  the  tem- 
perate zones,  from  utilizing  fertility  have  been:  first,  cold; 
second,  aridity;  third,  steep  and  rocky  surface;  fourth,  excess  of 


536        THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

moisture ;  and  fifth,  unwholesome  climate.    All  of  these  barriers 
are  now  giving  way. 

Until  the  latter  part  of  the  nineteenth  century,  man's  progress 
in  increasing  his  powers  and  combating  difficulties  was  almost 
entirely  the  result  of  the  unscientific  effort  of  untrained  workers 
and  the  enthusiasm  of  the  individuals  who  tamed  the  wild 
animals  of  the  forest,  cultivated  and  improved  by  selection  those 
plants  that  seemed  most  useful,  and,  by  accident,  made  inven- 
tions and  discoveries.  "We  have  now  entered  a  new  epoch. 

1.  Thousands  of  men  are  now  being  definitely  trained  in  most 
of  the  fields  of  human  endeavor  by  the  most  careful  study  of 
the  sciences   fundamental   to   existing  knowledge    and   future 
discoveries. 

2.  Institutions  are  supporting  the  constructive  work  of  these 
men.     Edison  and  Burbank  were  compelled  personally  to  raise 
money  for  the  support  of  their  profoundly  important  work. 

The  war  has  doubtless  resulted  in  giving  the  development  of 
science  a  much  firmer  basis  of  financial  support:  for  it  has 
clearly  shown  that  national  protection,  industrial  development, 
and  human  life  are  dependent  on  science  to  a  greater  degree 
than  we  had  ever  thought.  We  may,  therefore,  expect  science  to 
be  promoted  much  more  effectively  in  the  coming  decades. 

An  example  of  revolutionary  discovery  is  the  recent  unravel- 
ing of  the  laws  of  heredity,  which  permits  us  to  make  an  art  of 
breeding  and  thus  of  improving  the  plants  which  furnish  us 
most  of  our  food,  clothing,  and  raw  materials.  These  plants 
become  machines  and  man  the  mechanic,  a  manufacturer  of  food 
machines.  We  now  understand  the  effect  of  environment  in 
fitting  plants  to  survive  particular  conditions.  The  climate  of 
Arizona  is  dry;  but  we  now  know  that  every  desert  in  the 
world  has  been  developing  plants  that  will  thrive  in  Arizona; 
for  example,  in  the  Old  World,  the  olive  illustrates  adaptation  to 
a  dry  environment.  We  need  no  longer  depend  on  the  chance 
introduction  of  plants  by  immigrants  and  independent  botanists. 
The  search  for  suitable  plants  has  been  definitely  organized  by 
governments  and  corporations.  The  alfalfa  from  Siberia,  or  the 
peach  from  Mongolia,  is  hardy  as  a  result  of  natural  selection 
during  ten  thousand  or  ten  million  raging  winters,  followed  by 
the  same  number  of  blazing  summers.  These  plants  may  be  well 


PLANT  IMPROVEMENT  587 

adapted  to  conditions  in  some  parts  of  the  United  States.  It  is 
also  raw  material  for  the  plant  breeder  of  the  Agricultural  Ex- 
periment Stations.  Because  of  the  work  of  the  explorer  and  the 
plant  breeder,  we  can  raise  new  cold-resistant  or  quick-growing 
plants  that  push  the  farm  line  north,  or  new  drought-resistant 
plants  that  push  the  farm  line  into  the  arid  regions,  or  better 
yielding  plants  in  the  fields  now  under  cultivation.  The  several- 
fold  increase  of  sugar  in  the  beet  within  a  century  is  indicative  of 
further  changes  that  may  be  wrought  in  any  plant  and  are  now 
actually  in  progress  in  many.  Surprising  results  have  been  ob- 
tained in  producing  kinds  of  corn  which  are  (a)  more  vigorous 
and  productive,  (b)  more  oily,  (c)  more  starchy,  (d)  more 
highly  charged  with  protein  than  are  the  ordinary  varieties. 
As  a  result  of  the  search  for  the  plants  of  the  world's  cold  and 
arid  deserts  and  the  improvements  of  plants  there  found,  new 
crops  are  already  being  produced  and  harvested  in  lands  pre- 
viously considered  too  arid  or  too  cold  for  any  use  save  as 
scanty  pastures.  One  of  these  quick-growing  plants  is  the  kafir 
corn,  now  grown  near  the  one  hundredth  meridian  in  the  United 
States,  where,  for  every  mile  it  pushes  the  farm  line  westward, 
it  opens  to  cultivation  sixteen  hundred  square  miles  of  farms, 
which  will,  under  existing  American  conditions,  easily  support 
seventy-five  thousand  people,  and  in  some  countries  would  sup- 
port several  times  that  number.  The  thornless  cactus  may  make 
good  pasturage  in  what  is  now  the  dead  desert.  The  wet  lands 
may  receive  almost  equal  benefit  from  new  crops. 

THE  DOMESTICATION   OF  NEW   PLANTS 

Vast  additions  to  wealth,  comfort,  and  industry  are  to  come 
from  the  domestication  of  plants  now  unused  or  produced  only 
by  unaided  nature.  A  suggestive  example  of  this  policy  with 
its  revolutionary  results  is  the  history  of  the  cinchona 
industry.  The  bark  of  this  tree  produces  quinine,  so  highly 
prized  as  a  remedy  for  certain  fevers  and  malaria  that  the 
British  Government  orders  it  to  be  kept  on  sale  in  every  post- 
office  in  India.  For  more  than  two  centuries  after  its  discovery 
in  1638,  cinchona  bark  was  produced  only  on  the  remote  eastern 
slopes  of  the  Andean  Mountains  in  Peru,  Bolivia,  Ecuador,  and 


538  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

Colombia.  It  was  gathered  from  trees  growing  wild  in  the 
forest,  and  no  one  thought  of  questioning  the  right  of  this 
mountain  range  to  a  permanent  world  monopoly  of  this  precious 
product,  until,  in  1852,  the  Dutch  Government  introduced  it  into 
Java,  and,  in  1860,  Clements  Markham,  an  Englishman,  intro- 
duced it  into  India.  It  is  now  cultivated  on  the  southern  slopes 
of  the  Himalayas  and  on  the  mountains  of  southern  India.  It 
was  cultivated  on  a  commercial  scale  in  Ceylon  with  such  success 
that  between  1881  and  1880  the  export  to  London  increased  from 
350  tons  to  over  5,000  tons.  The  Ceylon  supply  was  so  much 
larger  than  the  South  American  that  the  industry  became  un- 
profitable even  to  the  Ceylonese,  and  has  declined  in  that  country 
from  64,000  acres  in  1883  to  9  acres  in  1912;  but  it  has  steadily 
increased  in  Java,  with  its  populous  valleys  and  humid  mountain 
slopes,  until  the  export  from  its  cinchona  groves  reached  over 
10,000  tons  in  1911.  The  price  is  one-thirtieth  that  which  pre- 
vailed in  1870,  when  it  was  gathered  wild  on  the  Andean  slopes. 
The  export  from  South  America  has  practically  ceased,  for  the 
hunter  in  the  sparsely  peopled  forest  is  unable  to  compete  with 
the  myriad  villagers  on  the  plantations  of  Java. 

Within  two  decades  cultivation  of  rubber  has  passed  from  a 
dream  of  the  visionary  to  an  established  industry  which  promises 
in  a  very  few  years  to  render  unnecessary  the  unpleasant  jobs 
of  thousands  of  rubber  hunters  who  now  scour  some  millions  of 
square  miles  of  tropic  forest  in  Asia,  Africa,  South  America, 
Central  America,  and  Mexico  for  the  scattered  wild  rubber 
trees.  In  1911  wild  rubber  sold  in  New  York  for  $3.00  a  pound. 
A  better  product  is  now  raised  in  the  plantations  of  Ceylon  and 
Malaysia  for  about  twenty  cents  a  pound  and  its  price  has  gone 
down  to  so  low  a  figure  that  the  growers  are  wondering  if  they 
can  limit  the  output. 

Every  decade  of  the  twentieth  century  should  witness  one  or 
more  (probably  several)  such  important  transfers  of  the  deriva- 
tion of  an  important  product  from  the  forest  to  the  field  or 
orchard,  from  the  hunter  to  the  cultivator,  with  great  increase 
in  supply  and  reduction  in  cost.  An  interesting  example  of 
change  of  source  is  the  recent  discovery  that  the  hevea  (Bra- 
zilian) rubber  tree  of  the  Malayan  plantations  produces  seeds, 
containing  forty-two  per  cent,  of  an  oil  closely  resembling  linseed 


OUR  ANIMAL  RESOURCES  539 

oil.  This  discovery  will  probably  release  ground  for  wheat  in 
Argentina,  Dakota,  and  Manitoba,  where  now  the  fields  are  taken 
up  by  the  very  exhausting  crop  of  flax  for  linseed  oil. 


ANIMAL   BREEDING 

The  breeding  of  animals  is  another  example  of  the  success  of 
science  in  affecting  agriculture.  Animal  breeding  follows  the 
same  laws  as  plant  breeding  and  has  been  longer  understood. 
We  can  estimate  the  value  of  the  work  already  done  by  com- 
paring the  useful  cow  with  the  wild  buffalo.  By  the  application 
of  science  to  animal  breeding,  the  efficiency  of  our  domestic 
animals  in  many  respects  can  be  approximately  doubled.  (See 
chapter  on  Dairy  Industry  for  improvements  in  the  dairy  cow. 
See  chapter  on  Poultry  for  improvements  in  the  hen.) 

ULTIMATE   USES  OF  THE  SEA 

It  has  already  been  pointed  out  in  this  chapter  that  the  sea 
contains,  through  the  difference  of  its  upper  and  lower  tem- 
peratures, a  resource  of  power  probably  usable  even  under 
present  conditions,  and  in  quantities  beyond  all  computation  in 
terms  of  man's  need. 

The  food  supply  that  the  sea  may  give  us  is  perhaps,  on  the 
side  of  flesh  foods,  almost  as  limitless  as  the  possible  resources 
of  power.  It  may  completely  overshadow  the  land  in  its  pos- 
sible production  of  edible  flesh,  and  that,  too,  with  almost  no 
labor  for  production.  As  factors  pointing  to  such  a  conclusion, 
we  have  its  area  of  150,000,000  square  miles  in  comparison  to 
the  land  area  of  50,000,000.  We  know  that  much  of  the  land 
area  is  of  very  low  productivity  because  of  the  varying  limita- 
tions of  drought,  cold,  rocks,  low  fertility,  and  perhaps  diseases. 
In  contrast  to  this,  the  sea  teems  with  life  and  fertility.  All  of 
the  sea  contains  plant  food,  the  leachings  of  all  continents  for 
geologic  epochs,  and  while  the  trees  of  a  land  forest  are  spec- 
tacular, they  may  not  of  necessity  represent  a  greater  annual 
growth  per  unit  of  area  than  the  product  of  a  similar  area  of 
open  sea  where  no  plant,  save  perhaps  a  little  floating  seaweed, 
is  visible,  but  where  microscopic  plant  forms  in  great  quantity 


540  THE  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

grow  not  only  on  the  surface  of  the  sea  but  far  beneath  it,  and 
microscopic  animals  and  small  animals  a  fraction  of  an  inch  long 
exist  here  in  great  quantities. 

The  chapter  on  fish  showed  how  little  we  have  touched  this 
resource.  We  have  not  begun  to  catch  even  the-  herring  in  the 
North  Pacific.  We  are  still  throwing  away,  according  to  one 
estimate,  fifteen  to  twenty  thousand  whales  a  year  in  the  Ant- 
arctic Ocean  alone.  Each  of  these  whales  is  the  equivalent  of 
about  a  hundred  beef  cattle.  Each  of  these  in  turn  is,  accord- 
ing to  the  table  in  Chapter  VIII,  equal  to  the  product  of  about 
six  acres  of  good  Illinois  land.  Thus  the  fifteen  thousand  whales 
equal  1,500,000  cattle,  or  the  product  of  ninety  thousand  acres 
of  the  best  farm  land  anywhere  occupied  by  white  men. 

When  we  start  out  scientifically  to  search  the  sea  for  food, 
we  may  easily  find  that  a  single  species  of  the  smaller  floating 
mollusks,  such  as  the  pteropod  mentioned  in  the  chapter  on  fish, 
will  equal  in  total  bulk  of  edible  food  all  the  meat  animals  now 
possessed  by  man.  Thus  a  few  decades  or  centuries  hence,  the 
fishing  ships  of  Britain  might  bring  back  from  the  Arctic,  the 
Antarctic  or  the  tropic  sea,  one  hundred  or  two  hundred  pounds 
per  capita  per  year  of  pteropods — fresh  frozen,  dried,  or  canned. 
Furthermore,  it  may  be  as  easy  to  do  this  for  a  population 
of  two  hundred  million  as  for  a  population  of  fifty  million.  The 
same  is  of  course  true  for  New  England,  for  France,  for  Japan, 
or  any  other  industrious  nation  that  applies  science  and  energy 
rather  than  chance  and  prejudice  to  the  problem  of  securing  a 
food  supply  from  the  sea.  Such  a  change  would  merely  be  the 
adoption  by  the  Western  World  of  the  already  well-proven  Japa- 
nese dietary  of  fish,  cereals,  vegetables,  and  very  small  quantities 
of  meat. 

Doubtless  this  may  sound  fantastic  to  many  persons  of  a  so- 
called  practical  turn  of  mind,  but  I  wish  to  call  attention  to  the 
fact  that  there  has  been  no  systematic  economic  survey  of  the 
sea.  Most  of  the  scientific  work  that  has  been  done  in  the  past 
has  been  done  for  the  systematic,  classifying  scientists.  At 
great  expense  we  have  dropped  a  little  dredge  down  twenty- 
five  thousand  feet,  brought  up  all  the  traces  of  life  we  could, 
and  classified  every  species  we  could  identify,  giving  them  two 
Latin  names  in  a  learned  monograph  for  the  bookshelf  of  the 


OUR  ENEMY  CONSERVATISM  541 

zoologic  or  geologic  specialist.  Meanwhile  edible  pteropods, 
(merely  one  of  many  species)  float  about  in  unnumbered  billions 
waiting  for  some  constructive  servant  of  humanity  to  tell  us 
just  where  they  may  be  found,  how  they  may  be  caught,  how 
they  may  be  prepared  for  food,  and  then  to  actually  come  teach 
us  conservative  landsmen  how  good  they  are  and  how  to  use 
them.  It  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  more  useful  piece  of  work 
than  the  effective  introduction  of  hungry  man  to  the  food  re- 
sources of  the  sea.  A  relatively  small  amount  of  work  as  man's 
efforts  go,  would  in  a  few  decades  easily  achieve  such  a  result, 
and  do  much  to  put  hunger  out  of  the  list  of  troubles  of  any 
people  willing  to  work. 


CHAPTER  XXVI 
TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE   FOOD  SUPPLY 

POSSIBLY  the  greatest  of  all  agricultural  benefits  resulting  from 
applied  heredity  will  be  the  breeding  of  new  crop-yielding  trees 
— a  piece  of  relatively  slow  scientific  work  for  which  we  are  now 
ready.  It  promises  to  be  so  exceedingly  useful  because  (1)  it 
will  give  us  new  foods,  (2)  it  will  enable  us  to  use  now  useless 
land,  and  (3)  it  will  save  the  greatest  of  resources  by  furnishing 
crops  for  hilly  regions  which  can  then  be  productive  without  the 
destruction  of  soil  that  now  accompanies  the  attempt  to  plow 
them  and  put  them  in  the  grain  crops  ill  suited  to  such  lands. 

Man  (or  more  properly  woman)  began  agriculture  at  the 
wrong  end  of  the  plant  kingdom.  The  grains  on  which  we  feed 
are  all  weaklings.  The  harvest  is  often  but  a  small  handful  in 
comparison  with  the  bushels  yielded  by  trees — the  engines  of 
nature  which  have  for  ages  been  giving  man  the  most  astonishing 
object  lessons  of  production,  and  inviting  him  to  improve  them 
rather  than  the  feeble  grains  at  their  feet.  But  the  grains  are 
annuals — a  great  advantage  to  the  primitive  woman  from  whom 
we  learned  most  of  our  agriculture.  The  time  has  now  come 
for  a  systematic  scientific  utilization  of  our  agricultural  re- 
sources, including  trees.  Centuries  of  actual  experience  in 
various  parts  of  the  world  tend  to  prove  that  we  may  have  a 
whole  new  agriculture,  which  at  all  stages  will  be  perfectly 
adapted  to  the  natural  resources  of  the  earth. 

Land  naturally  tree-covered  may  be  classified  according  to 
intensity  of  cultivation  and  value  of  output  somewhat  as  follows: 
first,  the  forest  yielding  game,  furs,  and  gums;  second,  the  forest 
yielding  lumber ;  third,  pasturage ;  fourth,  tilled  land  and  grain 
fields;  fifth,  orchards  yielding  tree  crops.  Whenever  we  find  an 
agriculture  that  has  substituted  the  perennial  tree  crops  for  the 
annual  grains,  we  find  an  agriculture  with  an  output  rivaled  only 
by  that  of  the  market  garden.  The  yield  of  wheat,  corn,  and 

542 


PLANT  BREEDING  543 

oats  is  scanty  in  comparison  with  the  heavy  harvest  and  large 
income  furnished  by  the  apple,  peach,  orange,  date,  olive,  and 
Persian  (so-called  English)  walnut.  Yet  we  have  hitherto  de- 
pended almost  entirely  on  the  chance  for  the  development  of 
useful  varieties,  produced  by  accidental  crossing. 

Now,  however,  science  has  taken  a  hand.  We  need  no  longer 
depend  on  chance,  the  resource  of  the  ancient  nomad.  We  know 
the  laws  of  plant  breeding,  and  as  a  result  tree  crops,  with  their 
great  yield,  will  no  longer  occupy  an  inconspicuous  place  in 
agriculture.  Probably  the  cultivated  fruit  trees  of  all  sorts  do 
not  cover  over  two  per  cent,  as  much  ground  in  America  and 
England  as  is  given  over  to  the  less  productive  grains.  As 
agriculture  adjusts  itself  to  resource,  tree  crops  with  their  great 
superiority  should  eventually  far  outstrip  the  grain  crops. 

Plant  breeding,  scientific,  not  accidental,  plant  breeding,  is  a 
force  that  will  transform  agriculture  as  the  steam  engine  has 
transformed  transportation  and  the. factory.  It  will  enable  us 
to  harness  the  trees,  the  great  productive  engines  of  the  plant 
kingdom.  The  plant  breeder,  the  constructive  botanist,  now  tells 
us,  for  example,  that  it  takes  only  time  and  patience  to  make, 
by  repeated  crosses,  a  good  crop-yielding  hickory  tree,  almost  an 
ideal  hickory  tree.  Its  nut  can  have  the  delicious  sweet  flavor 
of  the  shagbark,  the  thin  shell  of  the  bitternut,  and  a  sufficiently 
near  approach  to  the  size  of  the  Indian  giant  to  put  it  in  the 
same  class  with  the  English  walnuts  for  food  value,  accessibility, 
and  desirability.  It  will,  however,  differ  from  the  English 
walnut  in  being  thoroughly  acclimated  by  thousands  of  years' 
adjustment  to  our  changeable  climate,  whereas  the  English 
walnut  is  a  Mediterranean  exotic,  thoroughly  at  home  in  the 
United  States  only  on  the  Pacific  Coast,  where  Mediterranean 
conditions  prevail. 

For  two  centuries  the  white  man  has  been  felling  the  forests 
of  America  to  make  room  for  fields.  Many  an  Eastern  field,  now 
of  low  fertility  and  scanty  harvest,  has,  or  has  had,  on  it  the 
acorn-bearing  oak,  the  nut-bearing  walnut,  chestnut,  and  hickory 
(shagbark  or  shellbark),  the  .seedling  apple,  the  seedling  peach, 
the  red-heart  and  black-heart  cherry  (wild  mazzard),  and  the 
fruitful  persimmon  and  pawpaw.  Yet  this  year,  as  for  genera- 
tions, all  these  astounding  sources  of  crops  have  been  negligently 


544  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

brushed  aside,  cut  down,  rolled  in  piles,  burned  up  to  make  room 
for  wheat  and  corn. 

Science,  backed  by  money  and  patience,  offers  to  make  some 
good  tree  crops  for  a  million  square  miles  of  American  hills,  and 
for  other  millions  of  square  miles  in  other  continents  as  well. 
But  science  is  as  yet  doing  little  to  bestow  this  inestimable  gift 
upon  us,  because  the  work  depends  on  appropriations  by  far- 


FIG.  130. — Evergreen  oak  in  Portugal  with  an  average  annual  record 
of  750  quarts  of  acorns.  This  acorn  is  nearly  as  good  for  stock  food  as 
some  grains,  and  its  record  as  human  food  is  undoubtedly  much  older 
than  human  history  as  we  know  it. 


seeing  legislators,  and  such  legislators  are  not  often  picked  out 
by  the  voters — as  yet.  Is  it  too  much  to  hope  for  economic 
intelligence  here? 

Tree  crops  may  render  different  services  to  man's  attempt  to 
utilize  the  earth  and  increase  the  food  supply:  (1)  they  permit 
us  to  grow  crops  in  land  too  rocky  to  be  plowed;  (2)  they  pro- 
duce crops  on  land  too  steep  to  be  plowed;  (3)  they  thrive  on 
land  too  dry  for  grain  (for  the  tree  is  the  most  drought  resistant 
of  plants)  ;  (4)  they  permit  a  two-story  agriculture,  trees  above 
and  tilled  crops  beneath;  (5)  they  offer  valuable  substitutes  for 


WHAT  TREES  CAN  DO  545 

meat  as  well  as  for  bread  and  butter;  (6)  they  are  well  adapted 
to  plans  for  the  conservation  of  natural  resources. 

1,  2.     TREE  CROPS  IN  STEEP  AND  ROCKY  LAND.      THE  APPALACHIAN 
MOUNTAINS  OF  EASTERN  AMERICA  OFFER  AN  INTERESTING  EXAMPLE 

The  Anglo-Saxon,  with  the  level-land  plow  agriculture,  brought  from 
England,  a  land  of  gentle  rain,  entered  the  mountains,  felled  the  fine 
trees  of  the  rich  forest,  scratched  the  sloping  earth  with  a  plow  and 
planted  corn — corn,  the  great  king  crop  of  the  level  country, — the 
poorest  crop  of  the  hills.  Before  this  mountain  corn  crop  can  ripen,  it 
must  be  subjected  to  many  rains.  Unfortunately,  the  typical  summer 
rain  of  the  mountains  is  a  tearing,  pouring  thunder-storm  which  lets 
loose  on  an  acre  of  ground,  one,  two,  three,  and  even  four  hundred  tons 
of  rushing  water  in  a  single  hour.  It  is  therefore  natural  that  the 
earth  should  be  washed  away.  After  the  earth  has  been  deprived  of  its 
protection  of  forest  and  roots,  the  gashing  and  loosening  by  the  plow 
and  hoe  seem  to  be  a  further  special  preparation  for  its  complete 
removal  by  the  rushing  waters.  The  light,  loamy  soil  which,  if  properly 
cared  for,  might  nourish  a  thousand  or  ten  thousand  crops,  is  gone  in 
a  few  seasons,  and  merely  serves  to  choke  the  meadows  below  and  to 
hinder  navigation  of  the  valley  streams. 

This  hideous,  frightful,  bootless  waste  does  not  have  even  the  excuse 
of  enriching  one  generation  of  men.  The  process  of  corn-growing  is  so 
laborious  on  this  steep,  stumpy,  and  often  rocky  new  ground  that  the 
poor  mountaineer  gets  only  a  meager  crop.  In  the  effort  to  get  much 
money  for  little  corn,  he  turns  to  the  distillery  to  make  corn  whiskey. 
This  expedient  has  always  seemed  a  natural  right  to  the  hard-pressed 
mountaineer;  hence  the  century -long  conflict  between  the  moonshiners 
and  the  United  States  collectors  of  internal  revenue.  The  illicit  still 
yet  runs  in  Appalachia,  and  in  many  localities  the  man  who  has  shot  a 
Federal  revenue  officer  is  a  local  hero. 

Great  is  the  contrast  between  these  poor,  uncomfortable,  whiskey- 
cursed,  law-breaking  mountaineers  of  Appalachia  and  the  comfortable, 
prosperous  inhabitants  of  similar  but  less  favored  slopes  in  Corsica. 
I  have  traversed  miles  of  mountain  slopes  in  Corsica  having  the  angle 
of  a  house-roof.  The  slope  was  steep,  but  a  good  road  wound  in  and 
out  along  its  face.  At  intervals  we  passed  through  villages  of  substan- 
tial stone  houses,  with  well-built  churches,  well-stocked  stores,  and  often 
comfortable  inns.  The  people  were  farmers  who  made  their  living  from 
these  slopes  despite  the  house-roof  steepness.  A  genuine  mountain 
agriculture  has  been  developed  there,  a  tree  agriculture  which  prospers 
without  the  plow  and  its  attendant  erosion.  The  tree  can  utilize  the 
heat,  light,  moisture,  and  fertility  of  the  mountain  without  imposing 
upon  man  the  fearful  and  destructive  task  of  plowing  a  place  that 
was  never  meant  for  the  plow.  If,  perchance,  the  mountain  is  so  rocky 


546  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

that  plowing  is  impossible,  it  makes  no  difference  to  the  tree.  It  sticks 
its  roots  between  the  rocks  and  thrives,  perhaps  even  the  better,  as 
rocks  on  the  surface  check  evaporation  and  keep  the  moisture  in  the 
earth. 

I  recall  a  region  in  northeastern  Corsica  where,  except  for  a  few 
breaks  not  over  100  yards  each,  I  passed  for  fifteen  miles  through  an 
open  forest  of  chestnut  trees,  and  every  tree  was  grafted  to  a  heavy 
yielding  variety.  These  forests  are  really  orchards,  the  sustenance  of 
the  people  in  the  many  villages.  The  chestnut  is  to  them  what  corn  is 


Fio.  131. — Corsican  mountain  side  as  steep  as  a  house  roof.     No  free 
Is  as  in  America.    Every  tree  is  a  grafted  chestnut  and  the  crop  makes 

the  land  worth  $200  per  acre.     Note  the  prosperous-looking  gateway  of 

the  chestnut  land  owner. 

to  the  Appalachian  mountaineer,  and  more,  for  does  not  a  chestnut 
tree  once  established  outlast  two  or  three  generations  of  men?  There 
is  always,  so  I  was  told,  a  crop,  a  large  crop  succeeding  a  smaller  one, 
as  is  the  case  with  many  crop-yielding  trees.  Time  and  again  I  was  told 
in  Corsica  and  in  France,  by  growers,  merchants,  and  government 
officials,  that  the  average  annual  yield  of  a  good  mature  chestnut  orchard 
was  from  2,000  to  3,000  pounds  of  nuts  per  acre. 

This  nut  is  food  for  man  and  beast.  It  is  also  the  money  crop  to 
pay  for  purchases  from  the  outside  world.  The  Corsican  mountaineer 
eats  his  chestnuts  fresh,  boiled,  roasted,  made  into  mush,  baked  on  the 
griddle,  fried  in  oil,  baked  into  a  loaf,  and  also  in  a  few  other  ways. 

After  the  human  harvesters  have  picked  up  the  best  of  the  nuts,  the 
pigs  are  turned  in  to  finish  the  crop.  A  good  pig  will  add  unto  himself 
two  pounds  of  weight  per  day  for  a  couple  of  months;  he  is  then,  at 
the  beginning  of  winter,  salted  down  for  future  reference. 

Furthermore,  there  is  pasture  beneath  the  chestnut  trees,  for  they 


AN  ILLINOIS  PECAN 


547 


548  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

are  not  allowed  to  make  a  dense  shade.  They  produce  better  if  the 
sunshine  can  fall  on  all  of  the  branches.  Pigs,  cows,  mules,  and  goats, 
especially  goats,  browse  beneath  the  trees.  Goats'-milk  cheese  is  an 
export  of  Corsica,  and  it  is  worthy  of  note  that  a  balanced  ration  is 
furnished  by  the  starchy  chestnut  bread  and  the  cheese  from  the  goat 
that  browses  beneath  the  tree.  It  is  a  standard  and  by  no  means  bad- 
tasting  meal  in  many  Mediterranean  mountain  districts.  The  goat, 
which,  in  proportion  to  size  and  food  consumed,  is  the  greatest  milk- 
giver  in  captivity,  thus  plays  an  important  part  in  adjusting  agricul- 
ture to  the  environment. 

So  far  as  I  know  there  is  not  one  ungrafted  chestnut  tree  among 
many  thousands  in  Corsica.  The  seedling  nut  tree  is  nearly  always  a 
scrub,  but  the  grafted  trees  are  all  aristocrats,  i.e.,  lineal  descendants 
of  the  Napoleons  and  George  WashingtOns  among  trees. 

It  is  easy  to  see  that  high  value  should  attach  to  a  tree  that  lives  for 
a  century  or  two,  produces  regularly  of  valuable  crops  without  labor 
and  sells  for  much  good  money  when  it  is  finally  felled.  I  was  re- 
peatedly told  by  reliable  Corsicans  in  1913  that  while  unplanted  land 
has  practically  no  value,  these  orchards  are  worth  from  $150  to  $250 
per  acre.  That  figure  puts  Appalachia  to  shame,  and  compares  well 
with  Illinois  corn-land  values.  One  of  the  methods  of  calculating  the 
value  of  the  orchards  pays  a  curious  compliment  to  the  tree.  The  bear- 
ing capacity  of  the  tree  is  estimated  by  an  expert.  This  is  multiplied  by 
five  centimes  per  kilogram  of  bearing  capacity.  This  result  is  reduced 
by  one-third  for  the  cost  of  picking  up,  and  this  result,  the  earning 
power  of  the  tree,  is  multiplied  by  twenty  to  give  the  value  of  the  tree. 
The  land  is  thrown  in  for  nothing.  Thus  a  tree  yielding  200  kilograms 
(220  Ibs.)  is  worth  133.4  francs,  and  ten  such  trees  would  make  an 
acre  of  land  worth  1334  francs,  or  more  than  $250.  As  the  trees  grow 
old  and  must  be  cut  out,  they  are  worth  their  cost.  Hence  the  high 
rate  (twenty -fold)  of  capitalizing  the  earning  power  of  the  tree.  It 
is  salable  and  non-depreciating  property.* 

The  chestnut  is  typical.  There  are  many  more  crop  trees,  and 
equally  effective  examples  of  utilization  of  some  of  them  might 
be  given  if  space  permitted. 

The  tree-crop  agriculture  that  puts  hilly  and  rocky  land  on  a 
par  with  plowed  land  becomes  more  significant  when  one  remem- 
bers that  the  most  of  New  England  has  never  been  plowed ;  that 
in  some  New  England  States  the  greater  part  of  the  land  that 
has  been  plowed  has  been  abandoned  because  of  the  rocks;  and 
that  perhaps  a  million  square  miles  of  the  United  States  with 

*  See  "  Farming  Appalachia,"  by  J.  Russell  Smith,  Review  of  Reviews, 
March,  1916. 


TREES  ON  MOUNTAINS  549 

good  climate,  good  rain,  good  soil,  cannot  be  permanently  plowed 
because  its  steepness  will  cause  its  absolute  ruin  through  erosion. 

For  New  England,  as  for  other  rough  and  rather  humid 
regions,  the  significance  of  the  crop-yielding  trees  such  as  the 
mulberry,  the  walnut,  hickory,  acorn-bearing  oak,  and  many 
others  is  this — these  trees,  these  engines  of  production,  do  not 
depend  upon  the  plow.  They  are  indifferent  to  rocks.  They 
can  wedge  their  trunks  in  between  the  rocks,  send  their  roots  far 
down  into  the  moist  glacial  subsoil  which  is  richer  than  the  sub- 
soil of  Indiana,  rear  their  heads  into  the  abundant  sunshine,  and 
produce.  What  care  they  for  rocks?  If  there  is  earth  among 
them,  the  tree  roots  will  find  it. 

What  New  England  and  all  hilly  countries  most  need  is  the 
application  of  science,  to  give  them  an  agriculture  that  is  ad- 
justed to  their  unplowable  soils.  The  present  agriculture  of 
New  England  is  a  misfit  imported  from  the  lands  suited  to  the 
plow. 

Everywhere  east  of  the  Mississippi  trees  will  grow  where  there 
is  earth  standing  above  the  water  level.  With  properly  improved 
varieties  of  tree  crops  there  is  no  reason  why  Massachusetts  might 
not,  square  mile  for  square  mile,  produce  as  many  fat  pigs  or  fat 
sheep  or  fat  turkeys  as  Kansas  does  now — possibly  more.  The 
proper  succession  of  fruiting  mulberries,  persimmons,  chestnuts, 
walnuts,  pecans,  hickories,  shagbarks,  filberts,  and  many  other 
tree  crops  that  might  be  introduced  from  this  and  other  countries 
would  give  us  an  abundance  of  good  food  from  a  continuous  suc- 
cession of  workless  harvests  which  the  pigs,  sheep,  and  turkeys 
could  eat  if  man  himself  did  not  want  them. 

Thus  may  the  production  of  the  eastern  part  of  the  country  be 
doubled.  The  one-third  that  is  now  too  hilly  for  good  culti- 
vation will,  with  tree  crops,  double  and  more  than  double  its 
present  meager  output.  The  roughest  third,  which  cannot  be 
tilled,  can  with  tree  crops  match  in  productivity  the  best  third, 
which  should  be  kept  for  cultivation  by  the  plow,  to  which  it  is 
by  nature  adjusted. 

3.   TREE  CROPS  FOR  ARID  LAND 

The  benefits  that  tree  crops  can  render  the  arid  and  semi- 
arid  lands  are  equal  to  if  not  greater  than  those  that  they  may 


550  TREE  CROPS  AND"  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

confer  on  the  hilly  lands.  The  grasses,  grains,  and  ordinary 
forage  plants  are  ill  equipped  to  fight  for  life  against  the  rigors 
and  vicissitudes  of  aridity.  Corn,  for  example,  must  have  water 

within  a  certain  two 
weeks  or  it  is  blasted, 
but  trees  can  prepare 
for  a  siege.  In  the  first 
place,  their  roots  can  go 
down,  to  a  great  depth. 
These  roots  can  store  up 
energy,  and  when  the 
times  comes  they  can 
often  support  the 
growth  that  makes  fruit. 
Furthermore,  many  of 
the  trees  of  the  arid 
lands  are  legumes,  with 
the  legume's  power  of 
gathering  nitrogen  from 
the  air,  leaving  a  part 
of  it  on  their  roots  to 
enrich  the  soil,  and 
using  the  rest  to  make 
seeds  that  are  rich  in 
nitrogen  and,  therefore, 
meat  substitutes  and  tis- 
sue builders. 

A  claimant  for  su- 
premacy in  the  possible 
desert  harvest  of  several 
continents  is  the  wide- 
pod  thorny  honey  locust, 
a  leguminous  tree  with 
a  big  fleshy  pod  easily 


FIG.  133. — Fruiting  branch  of  Hie  wild 
persimmon  in  Georgia.  The  persimmon  is 
very  nutritious  and  grows  wild  over  nearly 
a  million  square  miles.  It  •probably  will 
become  a  great  forage  crop,  as  domestic 
animals  like  it  and  the  tree  is  very  hardy, 
growing  on  the  poorest  soil.  Part  of  the 
crop  had  already  fallen  from  this  branch 
when  photographed. 


picked  and  full  of  rich 
beans,  which  often  contain  over  fifty  per  cent,  of  sugars  and 
starches  and  also  have  a  high  percentage  of  protein.  This  tree 
will  grow  on  many  plains  now  considered  almost  worthless,  and 
its  seed  is  one  of  the  richest  of  all  stock  foods.  It  nearly  dupli- 


TREES  IN  THE  DESERT  551 

cates  in  quality  the  carob  bean,  the  "locusts"  of  John  the  Bap- 
tist's desert  sojourn.  That  leguminous  tree  is  now  a  crop  grown 
in  all  Mediterranean  countries,  and  many  beans  are  exported 
from  Cyprus  to  England  for  stock  food.  In  Spain  this  food  is 
the  oats  of  the  cavalry  horse.  A  little  of  it  also  comes  to  the 
United  States  to  be  manufactured  into  a  substitute  for  milk  for 
calves. 

This  honey  locust  is  but  one  of  nature's  many  desert  plants. 
One  of  the  botanists  of  the  Department  of  Agriculture  has  found 
six  species  of  woolly-fruited  wild  almonds  growing  on  the  deso- 
late shores  of  Pyramid  Lake  in  the  so-called  Nevada  Desert.  The 
desert  may  yet  bloom  with  almonds,  for  these  six  varieties  bear 
nutritious  though  small  and  bitter  fruit,  and  Mr.  Frank  Meyer, 
plant  explorer  of  the  Department  of  Agriculture,  brought  back 
from  central  Asia  the  seeds  of  wild  almonds  producing  good  fruit 
and  good  edible  oil  in  a  climate  with  an  estimated  rainfall  of 
eight  inches  per  year. 

Foreign  lands  have  great  numbers  of  promising  trees  to  offer 
us  when  once  we  set  out  in  earnest  to  breed  tree  crops.  If  we 
will,  we  may  easily  breed  the  crop-yielding  trees  and  convert 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  square  miles  of  almost  vacant  Western 
range  into  fruitful  orchards  for  the  fattening  of  beasts  or  the 
feeding  of  men. 

One  of  the  greatest  and  most  triumphant  agricultural  booms  in  the 
world  is  to  be  found  in  Africa — the  dry-land  farming  of  central  Tunis, 
where  the  rainfall  is  less  than  ten  inches.  This  success  is  astonishing 
in  the  face  of  the  uncertainty,  dread,  and  failure  that  harass  our  own 
as  yet  unadjusted  dry-land  agriculture.  As  an  evidence  of  local  failure 
1  would  cite  the  observations  of  an  agricultural  scientist  on  a  recent 
ninety-mile  journey  in  the  southern  part  of  the  American  Great  Plains, 
where  the  rainfall  averages  twenty  inches.  In  the  ninety  miles  trav- 
ersed there  was  but  one  surviving  settler  and  not  even  a  cattle-ranch. 
The  dry  farmers  had  pushed  out  the  cattlemen,  and  the  recent  droughts 
had  pushed  out  the  dry  farmers — all  but  one — in  a  strip  as  long  as 
from  New  York  to  Philadelphia.  Our  uncertainties  arise  under  a 
rainfall  of  ten  to  twenty  inches.  The  African's  complacency  is  assured 
by  less  than  ten  inches.  Subscriptions  have  recently  been  taken  up  for 
American  people  living  in  a  region  where  the  rainfall  averages  sixteen 
to  eighteen  inches.  Yet  the  successful  dry  fanning  of  Tunis  is  in  the 
vicinity  of  Sfax,  where  in  seven  consecutive  years  the  total  rainfall 
amounted  to  forty-one  inches — five  and  eight-tenths  per  year. 


552  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

The  Tunisian  rain  is  a  winter  rain,  which  is  the  best  kind  for  dry 
farming,  but  except  for  that  advantage  there  are  not  many  extenuating 
circumstances  in  the  climate.  Tunis  is  so  near  to  Sahara  that  it  is  a 
thorny  camel-pasture,  and  the  frequent  siroccos  of  the  summer  season 
are  fearfully  dry.  There  are  no  permanent  streams.  The  Tunisian 
success  depends  upon  the  fact  that  the  Arabs  long  ago  worked  out  to  a 
finish  the  dust-mulch  practice  (which  we  recently  "discovered"  with 


Fio.  134. — Olive  trees  planted  by  the  Romans  in  central  Tunis  more 
than  1,200  years  ago,  still  bearing  good  fruit  without  cultivation  and 
with  only  10  inches  of  rainfall  per  year.  The  tree  is  the  most 'enduring 
productive  device  within  the  reach  of  man. 

such  a  hurrah),  and,  further,  they  and  their  French  copyists  have 
applied  it  to  a  crop  that  suits  the  environment :  olives — a  tree  crop. 

The  summer  here  as  in  Palestine  is  one  unmitigated  drought  from 
spring  until  autumn.  The  grass  withers  and  assumes  the  dead  brown 
of  our  deepest  winter.  Dust  covers  the  parched  landscape,  but  under 
it  all,  the  olive,  with  its  leaf  hairy  on  one  side  and  glazed  on  the  other, 
scorns  drought  and  brings  its  fat  fruit  through  to  autumn  harvest.  If 
the  men  of  Africa  and  the  Scripture  lands  have  by  the  poverty  of  their 
environment  been  forced  to  employ  better  devices  than  we  now  possess, 
may  we  not,  by  the  application  of  our  brains,  imitate  them  and  apply 
at  home  the  agricultural  as  well  as  the  spiritual  lessons  they  have  taught 
us? 

I  rode  out  of  Sfax  in  three  directions — twelve  miles,  seventeen  miles, 
and  eighteen  miles,  respectively,  and  always  through  olive  orchards, 
which  lined  the  road  on  both  sides.  Near  the  town  they  were  from  forty 


THE  ARID  OILY  OLIVE  553 

to  eighty  years  old.  Farther  out  the  trees  were  younger,  and  the  new 
plantations  are  still  spreading.  I  rode  one  hundred  miles  to  the  south, 
and  at  the  end  of  the  journey  the  gray-green  of  the  olive-tree  was  still 
to  be  seen.  Although  most  of  the  intervening  distance  was  bare  of 
olives,  there  were  enough  plantations  en  route  to  show  that  the  whole 
district  was  suitable  olive  ground.  I  passed  groups  of  tenting  Arabs 
on  their  camels,  saw  their  camps  set  back  a  safe  distance  from  the 
good  French  road,  and  their  invaluable  "ships  of  the  desert"  browsing 
on  the  scattered  thorn-bushes.  Here  was  the  life  that  had  for  ages 
prevailed  on  the  edge  of  the  Old  World  deserts.  The  nomad  with  his 
tents  of  camel's  hair  pauses  awhile  where  the  browsing  is  good,  then, 
packing  his  chattels,  his  children,  and  his  wives  on  the  camels,  he  fol- 
lows his  flock  where  fancy  (and  browsing)  dictate.  When  one  had 
passed  these  ancient  scenes,  it  was  almost  uncanny  to  come  suddenly 
upon  a  two-thousand-acre  plantation  of  healthy  young  olive-trees 
stretching  away  across  the  well-tilled  plain  as  far  as  the  eye  could  see. 

In  one  direction,  I  was  told,  the  plantings  extend  almost  solidly  for 
one  hundred  miles.  The  seven  years  with  a  total  rainfall  of  forty-one 
inches  seemed  to  have  had  no  bad  effect  on  the  boom  nor  on  the  trees. 
The  plantings  would  be  much  more  extensive  than  they  are  if  it  were 
not  for  the  fact  that  the  government  fears  that  the  supply  of  labor  will 
run  short,  and  therefore  will  not,  at  present,  release  any  more  of  the 
camel-range  for  olive-planting.  .  .  . 

This  land  has  almost  no  value  as  pasture,  and  when  the  government 
releases  it,  it  is  virtually  given  away;  but  at  twenty-five  years  of  age 
the  seven  or  ten  olive-trees  on  an  acre  increase  its  value  to  $100  or  $150. 
If  well  cared  for,  the  average  yield  is  from  800  to  1,100  pounds  of 
olives,  worth,  at  1914  price,  from  fourteen  to  twenty  dollars  to  the 
grower.  The  gathering  of  the  crop  requires  from  four  to  six  days' 
(Arab  days')  work  per  acre.  The  oil  yield  is  thirty  or  thirty-three  per 
cent,  of  the  weight  of  the  olives.  Compare  table  of  acre  food  yields, 
page  175. 

Among  intelligent  Tunisians  there  is  no  discussion  as  to  which  is 
more  certain,  a  tree  crop  or  a  grain  crop.  They  know  that  they  cannot 
depend  on  grain.  It  is  authoritatively  stated  that  in  one  locality  even 
more  arid  than  Sfax  barley  gives  in  ten  years  two  good  crops,  three 
mediocre  crops,  and  five  failures,  while  the  olive  gives  in  three  years 
one  good  crop,  one  mediocre  crop,  and  one  failure — a  sixty-per-cent. 
advantage  in  favor  of  the  olive,  which  also  requires  less  work.  On  the 
very  edge  of  the  Sahara,  the  natives  have  been  growing  olives  for 
countless  centuries — probably  for  two  thousand  years,  and  it  may  be 
much  longer  than  that.  .  .  . 

The  lesson  for  the  American  lands  of  scanty  rainfall  is  clear:  To 
develop  at  once  a  list  of  crop-yielding  trees,  so  that  every  dry  farmer 
can  increase  his  chances  by  trying  at  least  two  kinds.* 

*  "  The  Real  Dry-Farmer,"  by  J.  Russell  Smith,  Harper's  JUagcurine,  May, 
1914. 


554  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

Most  suggestive  is  the  experience  of  Hawaii  with  the  algaroba, 
a  species  of  the  mesquite  (a  point  in  dispute  by  the  botanists) 
which  will  grow  extensively  in  the  United  States.  Hawaii, 
overcoming  many  difficulties  of  a  mechanical  nature,  has 
learned  to  grind  up  the  beans  and  pods  of  the  algaroba  bean, 
and  thereby  has  initiated  an  industry  of  great  promise.  The 
ground  meal  was  worth  $25.00  a  ton  as  a  stock  food  before 
the  war,  and  was  the  mainstay  of  the  dairy  industry  of  the 
islands.  The  Hawaii  experiment  station  issues  the  statement 
that  an  algaroba  forest  yields  four  tons  of  the  beans  and  one 
ton  of  wood  to  the  acre  per  year.  The  labor  of  production 
consists  of  picking  up  the  big  beans,  which  grow  on  a  leguminous 
tree  introduced  about  the  middle  of  the  last  century  from  Peru. 
This  great  yield  would  be  reduced  in  other  lands,  since  it  is  due 
to  the  phenomenal  fertility  of  the  volcanic  soils  of  Hawaii,  and 
the  tropic  growing  season.  Mesquite  grows  wild  from  Texas  to 
the  Pacific. 

Man  has  thought  of  himself  as  depending  on  a  field  in  which 
to  grow  his  food,  but  there  seems  abundant  reason  to  believe  that 
science  can,  through  tree  crops,  now  give  him  food  from  any 
land  that  grows  a  forest,  and  from  much  land  that  now  grows 
almost  nothing.  Moreover  the  tree  crop  has  a  valuable  by- 
product of  wood,  a  material  of  which  there  is  now  a  painful  and 
increasing  scarcity. 

Owing  to  the  long  time  involved  and  the  consequent  impossi- 
bility of  full  financial  return  to  the  individual  breeder,  the  breed- 
ing of  these  tree  crops  must  depend  largely  upon  governments, 
and  governments  will  act  only  in  response  to  the  pressure  of 
intelligence.  The  time  for  far-seeing  constructive  scientific  work 
has  come,  for  we  are  beginning  to  need  new  sources  of  food. 


4.      TWO-STORY  AGRICULTURE 

Crop  trees  are  so  effective  that  we  have  already  begun  in  this 
country,  as  in  some  foreign  countries,  to  use  them  on  good  level 
land  and  to  develop  a  two-story  agriculture. 

Approximately  nine-tenths  of  the  arable  area  of  Majorca,  one  of 
the  Spanish  islands  in  the  Mediterranean,  is  planted  out  to  crop-yielding 


A  PROVED  SUCCESS  555 

trees.  That  makes  one-story  agriculture.  Then  beneath  the  trees 
grain  is  grown.  That  makes  the  second  story.  For  miles  and  miles  in 
every  direction  that  beautiful  island  is  covered  with  continuous  orchards 
of  almonds,  olive,  figs,  and  carobs,  with  occasional  grafted  oak-t:3es, 
the  sweet  acorns  of  which  are  prized  as  highly  as  the  chestnut.  This 
tree  agriculture  is  nothing  new,  for  many  of  these  orchards  are  of 
unknown  age,  and  some  of  them  give  evidence  of  having  seen  genera- 
tions of  men  rise,  dig  awhile,  and  die  before  Columbus  sailed  past  on 
his  way  from  Genoa  to  Gibraltar;  and  throughout  all  the  years  that  the 
white  man  has  striven  in  America,  these  same  old  olive-  and  carob- 
trees  have  been  standing  there,  handing  down  their  harvests  of  fruit 
and  beans  to  the  men  who  raised  other  crops  at  their  feet — crops  of 
wheat,  oats,  barley,  beans,  and  peas. 

In  the  average  cases  it  works  out  that  the  grain  crops  pay  the  cost 
of  the  operation,  and  the  tree  crops  come  along  and  make  the  profits. 
The  failure  of  the  almonds,  or  tho  off  years  with  the  carobs  or  olives, 
therefore  leave  no  deficits,  and  the  years  of  good  tree  harvests  are  the 
years  of  profit.  If,  as  is  at  times  the  case  in  the  best-regulated  lands, 
there  is  a  shortage  in  the  grain  crop,  it  has  more  than  an  even  chance 
of  being  equalized  that  same  season  by  the  tree  harvest. 

No  one  should  be  deceived  into  thinking  that  he  may  get  a  hundred 
per  cent,  grain  crop  and  also  a  hundred  per  cent,  tree  crop.  That  would 
be  too  good  to  be  true,  too  much  like  eating  your  cake  and  having  it. 
The  situation  is  much  more  like  that  of  the  ship  that  is  loaded  with  pig- 
iron,  and  the  ship  that  is  loaded  with  chairs.  The  iron  cargo  is  so 
heavy  that  the  ship  still  has  most  of  her  space  empty.  The  chair  cargo 
is  so  light  that  the  ship  still  has  most  of  her  buoyancy  unemployed,  and 
her  owners  must  scurry  around  and  get  iron  or  other  heavy  stuff  to 
ballast  her  down  so  that  she  will  ride  safely.  By  properly  mixing  iron 
to  take  care  of  the  weight  and  chairs  to  take  care  of  the  space,  the  ship 
can  actually  stow  away  three-fourths  of  the  iron  and  three-fourths  of 
the  chairs,  and  thus  take  one  hundred  and  fifty  per  cent,  of  cargo. 

It  is  thus  with  the  trees  and  the  grain.  The  trees  send  their  roots 
down  into  the  subsoil,  and  their  tops  into  the  upper  air.  The  small 
grain  attends  to  the  surface,  and  does  most  of  its  growing  in  the  winter, 
when  the  rains  come  and  the  trees  are  resting.  The  two  stories  of 
agriculture  make  more  income  than  either  story  could  have  done  by 
itself.  Moreover  the  cultivation  and  fertilization  of  the  grain  is  an 
unquestioned  benefit  to  the  trees,  which  thus  become  in  a  sense  a  by- 
product of  the  grain  crop. 

The  Spaniards  and  the  Portuguese  apply  the  same  philosophy  by 
letting  oaks  grow  in  their  grain-fields  and  then,  when  the  crop  of 
acorns  gathers  itself  upon  the  ground,  bringing  their  porkers  along  for 
a  picnic,  fattening  them  upon  the  harvest  that  is  spread  beneath  the 
trees.  If  I  were  a  pig,  I'm  sure  I  should  elect  to  spend  that  orgy  of 
my  last  fattening  beneath  an  Iberian  oak-tree  rather  than  in  an 
American  pig-pen.  And  if  I  owned  a  pig,  I  would  find  it  more  agree- 


556  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

able  to  my  inherent  laziness  to  have  the  pig  pick  up  his  food  than  to 
gather  it  and  wait  upon  him  after  the  style  in  America. 

The  farmers  of  southwestern  France  annually  send  to  the  United 
States  millions  of  pounds  of  choice  Persian  (so-called  English)  walnuts, 
and  yet  there  are  not  ten  orchards  in  the  whole  region.  A  French 
farmer  gave  me  this  explanation : 

"If  we  planted  the  trees  in  regular  rows,  close  together,  we  could 
grow  nothing  beneath  them,  for  they  cast  a  dense  shade;  but  if  we 


Fio.  135. — French  roadside.  Xo  free  goods.  Wheat  comes  clear  to  the 
gutter.  The  trees  along  the  road  are  grafted  English  (Persian)  walnuts. 
A  good  tree  rents  for  as  much  as  an  acre  of  land,  and  produces  more 
human  food  than  an  acre  of  pasture  when  eaten  by  a  meat  animal.  In 
the  distance  at  the  left  grafted  chestnut  trees  line  the  fence  rows. 


scatter  them  about  the  fields,  there  is  plenty  of  light,  and  wheat  will 
grow  close  to  the  trees." 

One  exceedingly  intelligent  French  proprietor  whose  place  I  visited 
had  applied  this  theory  by  planting  all  his  fields  with  walnut-trees 
ninety  feet  apart.  Thirty  years  hence  it  will  look  like  a  great  park 
that  has  been  planted  to  grain,  and  as  they  approach  maturity,  every 
one  of  his  walnut-trees  will  be  making  more  human  food  than  will  be 
furnished  by  the  meat  from  an  acre  of  pasture.  For  years  (before  the 
war)  the  selling  price  of  this  French  walnut-tree's  harvest  was  more 


NEW  TREE  CROPS  557 

than  the  value  of  the  meat  produced  by  the  acre  of  pasture,  but  no  one 
can  predict  what  prices  will  be  during  the  one  or  two  centuries  that 
elapse  while  those  walnut-trees  still  continue  to  shed  their  autumn 
nuggets  of  nutrition.  .  .  . 

A  few  decades  hence  we  should  and  will  have  millions  of  acres  set 
to  fruit  trees  that  we  do  not  now  regard  as  crops,  with,  at  their  feet, 
rich  harvests  of  crops  economically  produced  by  machinery.  I  feel  con- 
fident in  this  prediction,  because  every  element  involved  has  been  tried 
and  found  good,  and  the  process  of  combination  has  already  begun. 

The  combination  that  leads  the  way  in  the  two-story  agriculture  of 
America  is  that  of  the  pecan  and  the  pastured  pig.  The  efficiency  of 
which  we  have  been  hearing  much  of  late  pertains  to  the  farm  as  well 
as  to  the  factory.  In  the  factory  it  has  been  discovered  that  much  of 
the  work  is  only  half  effective,  and  that,  owing  to  lack  of  system,  much 
time  is  spent  in  loafing  instead  of  in  work.  On  the  farm  the  very  same 
conditions  exist,  and  one  of  the  important  discoveries  of  farm-efficiency 
experts  is  the  fact  that  a  pig  is  good  for  something  besides  eating  and 
being  eaten.  He  can  work.  For  the  last  hundred  years  we  have  been 
regarding  the  pig  as  a  star  boarder  when  we  should  have  been  regarding 
him  as  a  harvest-hand.  The  days  of  porcine  luxury  are  passing,  and  on 
a  steadily  increasing  number  of  farms  the  pig  may  be  classified  among 
those  having  gainful  occupation.  The  point  is  this:  instead  of  labori- 
ously feeding  the  pig  in  small  inclosures,  where  he  eats  what  we  with 
human  labor  bring  him,  we  turn  him  into  the  fields  to  gather  for  himself 
crops  that  we  previously  harvested  by  our  own  hard  labor. 

The  really  new  feature  is  the  working  out  of  successions  of  quick- 
growing  crops  like  oats  and  vetch,  barley  and  vetch,  cowpeas,  soy 
beans,  sorghum,  sweet  potatoes,  peanuts,  Japanese  cane,  crimson  clover, 
red  clover,  and  the  old  stand-by  of  corn,  so  that  the  farmer  does  little 
more  than  to  plow  and  plant,  and  drive  his  pigs  from  field  to  field  to 
harvest  the  crops  as  they  ripen.  As  soon  as  the  pigs  leave  a  field, 
the  farmer  plows  it  up  and  plants  the  next  crop.  When  the  pig  goes 
from  the  fourth  or  fifth  field,  he  goes  to  market,  and  the  farmer  puts 
a  big  deposit  in  the  bank,  for  his  bill  for  labor  has  been  small.  He  has 
used  no  reaper.  He  has  not  had  the  work  of  making  hay;  he  has  known 
no  harvest  rush.  The  pigs  harvested  for  him,  and  thought  it  quite  a 
lark  at  that. 

From  Missouri  to  the  Delaware  and  from  Kansas  to  the  Gulf,  this 
system  of  pork  production  has  been  tried  and  found  good.  .  .  .  When 
some  kind  of  large,  hardy,  crop-yielding  trees  such  as  pecans,  walnuts, 
honey-locusts,  oaks,  or  persimmons  have  been  added,  the  trick  is  turned. 
There  is  nothing  un-American  about  the  method,  for  the  best  kind  of 
American  machinery  can  be  used  without  interference  wherever  it  is 
wanted.  Will  the  tree  interfere  with  the  harvest?  The  cumbersome 
reaping  machinery  does  not  enter  into  the  problem,  because  the  pig 
does  the  work.  Plows  and  cultivators  for  orchard  tillage  have  already 
been  brought  to  a  high  degree  of  perfection.  Indeed,  no  untried  experi- 


558  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

ment  is  involved,  for  the  plan  is  being  carried  out  with  success  on 
Georgia  pecan  plantations  that  I  have  visited.  .  .  . 

American  conditions  offer  great  incentives  to  this  two-story  combina- 
tion of  nuts,  fruit,  and  pork.  All  the  nut-trees  of  the  East  and  the 
South,  like  the  pecan,  the  Persian  walnut,  the  black  walnut,  the  shag- 
bark,  and  the  chestnut,  start  late  in  the  spring.  The  sun  shines  in  on 
the  first  floor  for  a  relatively  long  time;  conditions  are  therefore  favor- 


FIG.  136. — Two-story  farming.  Georgia  porkers  rooting  up  the  rem- 
nants of  a  sweet  potato  crop  in  a  young  pecan  orchard.  The  pecan  is  a 
coming  substitute  for  meat. 

able  to  cold-weather  plants.  Fortunately  we  have  such  plants.  The 
clover  of  our  fathers  blooms  in  early  June  at  Philadelphia,  but  the 
crimson  clover,  a  recent  importation  from  cool  Germany,  works  so 
busily  in  late  autumn  and  early  spring  that  it  blooms  in  April,  and 
has  virtually  done  its  work  before  any  nut-tree  begins  to  cast  the 
shadow  of  its  leaves.  The  vetches  are  good  companions  for  the  crimson 
clover  in  working  while  the  nut-trees  sleep. 

This  factor  is  of  great  and  increasing  importance  in  the  southern 
Atlantic  and  Gulf  regions,  where  the  deciduous  trees  are  bare  a  long 
time,  but  the  hardier  herbaceous  plants  grow  virtually  throughout  the 


STAPLE  FOOD  FROM  TREES         559 

winter.  It  is  in  that  region  that  the  two-story  agriculture  of  the  pig 
and  the  pecan  has  already  been  worked  out,  and  from  this  region  it 
should  be  extended  northward  far  into  the  land  of  frost  and  snow.* 


5.     STAPLE    FOODS    FROM    TREE   CROPS 

We  may  get  both  bread  and  meat,  that  is,  proteins  and  carbo- 
hydrates, from  trees,  though  we  have  not  been  doing  so  in 
America  thus  far. 

The  trouble  is  that  we  have  not  taken  tree  crops  seriously.  In  the 
autumn  we  go  forth  with  our  Children  and  gather  a  few  nuts  as  an 
outing,  which  is  little  more  important  in  our  eyes  than  the  collecting  of 
pretty  pebbles,  and  has  no  appreciable  influence  on  the  family  budget 
or  the  family's  nutrition.  We  pay  some  rather  high  prices  at  times 
for  fruits,  which  are  tree  crops,  it  is  true;  but  what  is  their  nutritive 
value  compared  with  that  of  the  trees  of  the  Mediterranean  garden?! 

It  has  been  pointed  out  by  Mr.  0.  F.  Cooke,  economic  botanist 
of  the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  that  agriculture 
in  the  Mediterranean  basin  began  with  tree  crops  and  that  at 
least  twenty  kinds  of  trees  there  have  still  some  importance  as 
crops  producing  staples  of  nutrition. 

Our  tree  crops,  our  apples,  peaches,  pears,  and  grapes,  our 
grape-fruit,  oranges,  and  lemons,  are  delightful  and  wholesome  and 
needed,  but  they  meet  no  major  nutritive  need.  These  needs  of  the 
body  are  protein  for  tissue,  and  fat  and  carbohydrates  for  energy. 
Except  for  a  small  amount  of  sugar  (and  sugar  is  already  one  of  the 
cheapest  of  our  foods),  our  popular  fruits  may  properly  be  compared 
to  a  refreshing  drink  or  a  succulent  salad.  The  Mediterranean  garden 
of  trees  produces  major  foods.  The  almond  contains  much  protein. 
The  walnut  contains  both  protein  and  fat;  the  oil  of  the  olive  is  more 
nutritious  than  butter  and  far  more  nutritious  than  the  flesh  of  animals. 
The  fig  is  a  real  food,  containing  some  protein  and  much  carbohydrate, 
and  giving  a  greater  amount  of  nutriment  per  pound  than  bread 
furnishes. 

So  great  is  the  service  of  the  Mediterranean  trees  to  man  that  the 
definition  of  a  garden  in  Syria  is  a  place  where  trees  are  grown;  such 
was  the  Garden  of  Eden.  The  Syrian  garden  is  full  of  trees, — walnut, 
almond,  olive,  carob,  fig,  apple,  peach,  pear,  cherry,  apricot,  orange, 

*  Smith,  Russell  .!.:  "Two-Story  Farming,"  The  Century,  July,  1914. 
t"The    Agriculture   of    the    Garden   of    Eden,"    by   J.    Russell    Smith, 
Atlantic  Monthly,  August,  1914. 


560  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

pomegranate,  and  mulberry.    Beneath  and  between  the  trees  the  vege- 
tables and  grains  are  grown. 

The  trees  in  this  Syrian  garden  furnish  an  important  and  practically 
necessary  part  of  the  nutrition  of  the  people.  Combined  with  grain  in 
the  form  of  coarse  bread,  the  tree-products  make  a  balanced  and  whole- 
some ration.  For  large  numbers  of  the  population,  at  least  one  meal  a 
day  is  commonly  composed  of  bread  and  walnuts.  The  walnut  is  rich 
in  both  protein  and  fat,  so  that  this  combination  virtually  duplicates 
in  nutritive  value  our  occidental  sandwich  of  bread,  butter,  and  meat. 
.  .  .  When  the  workman  on  the  Mediterranean  goes  from  home  for  a 
day's  labor,  he  often  takes  a  pocketful  of  olives  and  a  piece  of  bread  for 
his  lunch.* 

Emphasis  should  be  laid  on  the  fact  that  all  of  the  nuts  except 
the  chestnut  are  rich  in  protein,  and  therefore  are  meat,  milk, 
and  egg  substitutes ;  most  of  them  are  rich  also  in  fat.  (See  table 
of  food  values.)  The  chestnut,  though  it  contains  little  protein, 
is  rich  in  starch  and  therefore  is  a  real  bread  substitute ;  it  is  so 
used  by  millions  of  people  in  south  Europe. 

With  a  proper  development  of  varieties  of  the  chestnut,  we 
shall  be  able  to  have  chestnut  orchards  on  thousands  of  miles  of 
hills  in  the  temperate  zones  of  every  continent. 

Even  more  promising  as  an  eventual  substitute  for  grain  is  the 
acorn.  We  do  not  think  of  eating  acorns,  but  there  is  only  one 
reason  why  we  do  not:  namely,  that  most  of  them  possess  a  little 
bitter  tannin,  although  not  so  much  but  that  our  jovial  friend 
the  pig  gladly  and  successfully  fattens  himself  upon  them.  On 
some  parts  of  the  Mediterranean  coast  occasional  specimens  of 
oak  trees  produce  acorns  as  edible  and  nutritious  as  chestnuts, 
and  they  are  grown  in  grafted  orchards  for  sale  as  human  food, 
especially  in  the  Spanish  island  of  Majorca  and  adjacent  parts  of 
the  mainland.  In  parts  of  Spain  and  Italy  it  is  reported  that 
sometimes  as  much  as  twenty  per  cent,  of  the  food  of  the  poor 
people  consists  of  sweet  acorns.  I  have  myself  seen  the  acorn 
basket  passed  around  the  family  group  as  we  sat  by  the  fire  in 
a  Portuguese  farmhouse. 

When  he  cannot  have  grain,  man  is  quite  willing  to  eat  acorns, 
and  it  is  possible  that  in  the  whole  history  of  the  race  man  has 
eaten  more  acorns  than  wheat,  for  they  may  have  been  an  im- 

*  "  The  Agriculture  of  the  Garden  of  Eden,"  by  J.  Russell  Smith,  Atlantic 
Monthly,  August,  1914. 


THE  ACORN  AS  A  BREADSTUFF  561 

portant  starch  food  for  hundreds  of  thousands  of  years  when 
man  lived  in  the  woods.  The  Nevada  Indians  a  few  years  ago 
were  still  continuing  their  ancient  practice  of  crossing  the 
Sierras  in  the  autumn,  gathering  sacks  of  acorns,  drying  them 
and  carrying  them  over  the  mountain  into  Nevada  to  their  winter 
homes.  Acorns  were  the  breadstuff  of  the  tribe.  The  squaws 
crushed  them  between  stones,  soaked  them  in  water  to  take  away 
the  tannin,  baked  the  meal  into  bread  or  boiled  it  as  a  cereal  that, 
save  for  a  little  shortage  of  protein,  was  a  close  rival  in  nutrition 
to  the  porridge  of  Scotland  and  the  breakfast  food  of  America, 
provided  there  was  plenty  of  cream  on  the  white  man's  cereal, 
for  the  acorn  meal  analyzes  high  in  oil,  a  cream,  butter,  and 
bacon  substitute. 

Wheat        Leached  acorn    Unleached 

Corn  meal  flour  flour *  acorn  meal 2 

Water                 12.5  11.5  11.34  8.7 

Ash                       1.  .5  .29  2. 

Fat                        1.9  1.  19.81  18.6 

Protein                  9.2  11.4  4.48  5.7 

Carbohydrates    74.4  75.4  62.02  65. 

Fiber                     1.0  .2  2.06  6.63 

1  Of  California  black  oak  that  had  been  kept  twelve  years  and  lost  some 
of  its  protein 

J  "  California  Valley  White  Oak,"  from  National  Geographic  Magazine, 
August,  1918. 

There  is  no  reason  to  doubt  that  there  has  been  many,  many 
times  more  acorn  flour  than  wheat  flour  eaten  by  man  in  Cali- 
fornia. Acorn  bread  and  mush  was  the  staff  of  life  from  the 
Oregon  boundary  to  Mexico,  save  in  deserts,  and  in  California 
alone  there  were  three  hundred  thousand  Indians  (estimated) 
at  the  time  of  the  coming  of  the  white  man.  In  an  astonishing 
article  in  the  National  Geographic  Magazine  for  August,  1918, 
Mr.  C.  Hart  Merriam,  ex-chief  of  the  United  States  Biological 
Survey,  says  that  one  part  acorn  to  four  parts  corn  or  wheat 
"makes  palatable  bread  and  muffins,  adding  to  the  cereal  value 
the  value  of  a  fat  nut  product.  John  Muir,  during  his  arduous 
tramps  in  the  mountains  of  California,  often  carried  the  hard 
dry  acorn  bread  of  the  Indians  and  deemed  it  the  most  compact 
and  strength-giving  food  he  ever  used." 


562  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

Acorns  of  several  species  (there  are  fifty  in  the  United  States 
alone)  were  eaten  by  various  Eastern  tribes  from  Canada  to  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico.  Buried  in  the  cold  mud  beside  a  spring,  the 
Indian  cache  of  acorns  has  been  known  to  keep  sweet  for  thirty 
years.  When  we  consider  that  some  oak  trees  have  a  record  of 
a  ton  of  acorns  at  a  crop,  we  realize  that  we  have  here  a  great 
source  of  starch  food.  Though  the  statement  cannot  be  proved, 
or  disproved,  I  venture  the  prediction  that  on  several  hundred 
thousand  square  miles  of  the  United  States  more  carbohydrate 
oan  be  produced  from  the  oak  tree  than  from  corn.  I  refer  to 
the  hilly  regions  where  corn-growing  means  erosion,  and  in  a 
few  generations  the  destruction  of  the  soil,  whereas  properly 
selected  and  grafted  acorn-bearing  oaks  would  yield  for  an  in- 
definite period,  and  would  then  be  magnificent  timber.  Although 
there  is  no  immediate  prospect  that  man  will  need  the  acorn  for 
bread,  it  is  comforting  to  know  that  it  is  waiting  for  us  when 
we  choose  to  utilize  it,  and  improve  it  as  we  have  improved  the 
apple,  the  peach,  and  the  orange.  In  the  meantime  it  is,  like 
corn,  good  pig  feed,  and  well  worth  growing  for  forage.  An 
acorn  diet  need  be  no  hardship  to  man.  There  is  little  reason 
to  doubt  that  the  factory,  by  properly  combining  acorns  with 
wheat  flour  and  other  cereals  and  nuts,  could  make  excellent 
bread  which  might  have  just  the  right  proportions  of  fat  and 
protein  to  be  perfect  food.  The  extracted  tannin  might  easily 
be  sold  to  the  leather  manufacturers,  furnishing  a  further  source 
of  profit. 

6.      TREE    CROPS   AND    CONSERVATION 

The  proper  development  of  tree  crops  will  help  to  conserve 
the  soil,  our  greatest  and  irreplaceable  resource.  The  saying, 
''After  man  the  desert,"  is  all  too  true,  as  the  frightful  desolation 
of  the  site  of  most  ancient  empires  attests.  This  desolation  is 
almost  entirely  due  to  erosion,  which  tree  crops  with  their  earth- 
gripping  roots  will  stop :  for  the  tree  is  nature's  means  of  holding 
earth  on  the  rocky  framework  revealed  by  erosion  so  near  the 
surface  of  our  hills  and  mountains. 

The  planting  of  our  hillsides  with  crop  trees  will  help  us  to 
utilize  the  distant  flood  plains:  for  it  affords  a  new  method  of 


MAKING  THE  GULLY  USEFUL  563 

controlling  rivers,  checking  floods,  and  also  of  increasing  navi- 
gation, water  supply,  and  water-power.  At  the  present  time 
man  is  fighting  floods  by  the  building  of  artificial  lakes  in  moun- 
tain defiles.  More  effective  is  a  device  worked  out  by  the  Arabs 
of  Tunis,  and  by  a  Pennsylvania  farmer  in  his  apple  orchard. 
This  Pennsylvanian  mado  small  holes,  called  water-pockets,  small 
reservoirs  each  holding  a  few  barrels  of  water,  at  the  base  of  each 
tree.  Every  rain  fills  them ;  and  the  water  soaks  gradually  into 


FIG.  137- — Water-pockets  which  effectually  atop  erosion  and  run-off  of 
water  on  a  20-degree  slope  in  a  Pennsylvania  apple  orchard.  Basins  or 
temporary  ponds  above  the  trees  hold  many  barrels  of  water  each,  and 
permit  it  to  soak  into  the  earth.  Invention  of  J.  H.  Meyer. 

the  ground,  thus  entirely  stopping  run-off  and  greatly  increasing 
the  crop  on  the  trees.  The  influence  on  nearby  springs  and 
wells,  and  consequently  on  the  flow  of  streams  needs  no  explana- 
tion. These  water-pockets  also  annihilate  the  gully — one  of  the 
greatest  enemies  of  mankind. 

The  preparation  of  hill  lands  for  these  tree  crops  may  require 
a  great  amount  of  work  in  the  digging  of  water-pockets,  the 
making  of  roadways,  and  in  some  cases  the  removal  of  stones.  A 
short  time  ago  these  tasks  required  brute  muscle.  Now  science 
has  placed  new  tools  in  man's  hands.  Explosives,  with  which  we 
have  become  so  familiar  in  war,  have  for  a  few  decades  been 
working  revolutions  in  quarrying,  mining,  tunneling,  road- 


564  TREE  CROPS  AND  OUR  ULTIMATE  FOOD  SUPPLY 

making,  and  agriculture.     Tractors  may  also  be  of  service  in 
some  of  this  work. 

Some  such  scientific  utilization  of  resources  will  be  necessary 
in  order  to  provide  land  for  the  returned  soldier.  It  was  easy 
after  the  Civil  War,  because  half  the  continent  lay  untouched, 


FIG.  138. — The  mangum  terrace — a  great  discovery  in  agriculture.  It 
is  a  ridge  going  across  the  face  of  a  slope  so  that  water  will  follow  it 
to  the  edge  of  the  field  instead  of  running  down  the  field  and  carrying 
away  the  soil.  While  it  retards  erosion  in  plowed  fields  it  does  not 
prevent  the  use  of  farm  machinery,  and  can  itself  be  easily  made  with 
a  plow.  Ten-degree  slope  is  its  limit.  (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

level,  and  ready  for  the  plow.  Now  the  most  of  it  has  passed 
into  private  hands.  Whereas  the  amount  of  land  used  for  farms 
increased  at  an  average  rate  of  twenty-seven  per  cent,  per  decade 
between  1870  and  1900,  it  increased  only  five  per  cent,  between 
1900  and  1910,  although  population  increased  twenty  per  cent. 


WHAT  WE  CAN  DO  WITH  LAND  565 

We  can  no  longer  simply  go  and  take  land ;  we  must  now  reclaim 
it  from  water,  drought,  rock,  and  hill. 


THE   ULTIMATE   USES  OP  LAND 

The  crop  trees  have  an  important  place  in  our  ultimate  food 
supply.  Their  place  may  be  indicated  somewhat  as  follows,  in  the 
classification  of  the  final  uses  of  land  for  maximum  return  with 
conservation  of  the  soil: 

(a)  Where  heat,  moisture,  and  fertility  abound. 

1.  Level  or  gently  rolling  lands  will  be  tilled  as  at  present  but 
planted  to  more  productive  varieties  of  plants. 

2.  Sloping  lands  will  be  terraced  with  the  mangum  or  similar 
terrace  to  prevent  erosion  and  permit  cultivation. 

3.  Hilly,  steep,  and  rocky  lands  will  be  put  to  tree  crops,  with 
extensive  use  of  water-pockets. 

(b)  Lands  that  we  now  call  arid  or  semi-arid  can  in  many  cases  also 
be  planted  to  more  drought-resisting  plants  of  which  the  best  arc 
tree  crops,  which  here  also  may  be  aided  by  water-pockets. 

(c)  Cold  lands  where  the  cost  of  keeping  warm  is  great,  also  possi- 
bly lands  that  are  too  hot,  will  be  left  to  produce  timber  forests. 

(d)  Beyond  the  tree  crop  and  forest  zones,  in  lands  of  cold  and 
drought,  will  come  cactus  deserts  and  moss-covered  tundra  to  be 
used  as  pasture  ranges  by  animals  suited  to  the  conditions. 

(e)  The  bare  desert,  the  bare  rock,  and  the  snow  field  will  then  as 
now  remain  without  harvest,  save  for 

1.  the  possible  discovery  of  minerals  where  the  earth  is  visi- 
ble, and 

2.  the  possible  utilization  of  deserts  for  sun-power  generators, 
and 

3.  the  use  of  snow  fields  as  sources  of  water-power. 


CHAPTER  XXYII 
THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

"ONE-HALF  of  all  the  fruits  and  vegetables  raised  in  the  United 
States  never  reach  a  consumer,"  says  a  high  official  in  the  United 
States  Food  Administration.  As  was  shown  in  a  previous  chap- 
ter, probably  not  one  per  cent,  of  the  fruits  and  vegetables  that 
might  easily  be  raised  in  the  United  States  are  actually  pro- 
duced. The  high  prices  at  which  we  grumble  are  due  not  to 
scarcity  of  resource  but  to  the  stupidity  and  knavery  that  per- 
sists in  a  system  of  food  distribution  that  should  have  been  left 
behind  when  Noah  went  into  the  Ark. 

The  almost  unbelievable  waste  of  fifty  per  cent,  shows  that 
vast  improvements  can  be  made  in  the  cheapness,  abundance,  and 
quality  of  the  food  that  civilized  man  may  have  if  he  will  apply 
half  as  much  effort  to  the  problem  as  he  has  recently  applied  to 
war,  and  will  improve  conditions  in  the  following  respects: 

1.  The  organization  of  the  local  market. 

2.  The  organization  of  the  distant  market. 

3.  The   distribution   of  residence  with   refereuee   to   resources  and 
climate. 

I.     ORGANIZING   THE   LOCAL   MARKET 

The  railroad,  the  steamship,  the  telephone,  and  the  telegraph 
have  opened  to  us  a  world  market  and  world  commerce.  The 
novelty  of  these  opportunities  has  caused  them  to  be  used  to 
excess.  Man  may  be  said  to  have  gone  on  a  transportation  spree, 
a  very  orgy  of  transportation.  We  have  unduly  separated 
man's  home  space  from  his  sustenance  space,  to  the  detriment  of 
both  sustenance  and  home.  In  the  United  States,  a  country 
with  unused  resources  and  idle  land  on  all  sides,  an  increasing 
number  of  people  cannot  afford  to  buy  enough  food  to  nourish 
themselves  well.  We  have  let  the  railroad  paralyze  the  local 
market.  The  waste  of  fruit  and  vegetables  characteristic  of  the 

566 


THE  FARMER'S  S5-CENT  DOLLAR  567 

United  States  goes  on  also  to  a  lesser  extent  in  other  parts  of 
the  world  and  is  accompanied  by  dissatisfaction  on  the  part  of 
producers.  Mr.  Henry  W.  Collingwood,  editor  of  the  Rural 
New  Yorker,  one  of  the  leading  agricultural  papers,  has  for 
years  stoutly  maintained  *  that,  in  the  eastern  United  States, 
thirty-five  cents  of  the  consumer's  dollar  goes  to  the  farmer 
who  produces  the  food  while  the  rest  is  spent  (mostly  wasted) 
in  unproductive  expense  between  the  farmer  and  consumer. 

Evidence  to  support  this  claim  comes  from  Altoona,  Pennsyl- 
vania. A  few  years  ago,  the  markets  of  this  manufacturing  city 
of  sixty-five  thousand  people  in  a  beautiful  and  little  used  valley 
were  ill  supplied  with  poor  and  wilted  vegetables  at  a  high  price. 
Mr.  A.  B.  Ross,  then  engaged  in  agricultural  extension  work, 
organized  a  survey  of  the  food  supply  of  the  city  with  surprising 
results.  A  typical  case  was  that  of  a  barrel  of  apples  which  a 
farmer  in  Bedford  County,  Pennsylvania,  hauled  to  his  station, 
and  shipped  by  train  forty  miles  to  Altoona.  There  it  was  put 
on  a  dray  and  hauled  to  a  commission  merchant.  After  keeping 
it  for  a  few  days  the  commission  merchant  sold  it  to  a  man  who 
hauled  it  to  the  station  and  shipped  it  one  hundred  and  fourteen 
miles  over  the  Allegheny  Plateau  to  Pittsburg.  There  it  was 
again  put  in  a  dray,  taken  to  a  commission  house,  again  sold 
and  again  hauled  back  to  the  station,  put  on  a  train  and  shipped 
back  to  Altoona,  carted  to  a  commission  merchant's  store,  and 
sold  to  a  retail  grocer,  who  hauled  it  to  his  store,  broke  it  open, 
and  delivered  its  contents  in  many  small  lots  to  his  customers. 
This  one  barrel  of  app]es  underwent  four  sales,  six  cartings,  and 
three  railroad  journeys. 

We  cannot  afford  such  methods  when  the  railroads  arc  over- 
crowded. All  that  work  was  wasted  on  the  barrel  of  apples  be- 
cause the  marketing  of  food  was  unorganized.  Each  man  was 

*  "  I  know  that  thus  far  no  one  has  ever  been  able  to  disprove  the 
following  facts: 

1.  As  an  average  of  the  country's  farm   business   the   farmer  roci-ives 
a  thirty-five-cent  dollar — that  is,  thirty-five  cents  of  the  dollar  which  the 
final  consumer  pays. 

2.  The  present  system  of  distribution  and  sale  is  so  costly,  cumbersome, 
and  complicated  that  it  is  little  short  of  robbery  of  both   producer  and 
consumer. 

3.  Just  as  soon  as  the  farmer  is  convinced  that  the  price  paid  him  is 
fair  he  will  increase  his  crops  with  his  present  equipment — without  further 
advice." — Rural  New  Yorker,  October,  1916. 


568      THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

working  by  himself  in  the  dark.  Marketing  must  be  so  organ- 
ized that  we  shall  know  where  best  to  send  produce  with  a  mini- 
mum, of  hauling. 

The  Altoona  survey  showed  that  the  sixty -five  thousand  people 
there  were  spending  over  $4,000,000  a  year  for  perishable  farm 
supplies  shipped  more  than  fifty  miles  by  rail,  most  of  them 
indeed  from  Baltimore,  nearly  two  hundred  miles  away,  although 
there  were  within  a  few  miles  of  Altoona  large  areas  of  relatively 
unused  farm  land  with  great  variety  of  soils,  a  good  climate, 
and  plenty  of  farmers  bewailing  the  sadness  of  their  plight. 
Mr.  Koss  worked  out  a  plan  which  should  some  day  be  applied 
to  every  community  in  every  civilized  country  if  modern  society 
improves  as  we  have  reason  to  expect  it  to  do.  The  plan  is  to 
study  the  local  food  needs  and  the  possibilities  of  local  food 
production,  and  so  far  as  is  feasible  to  make  the  locality  feed 
itself.  The  attempt  to  supply  local  markets  with  local  produce 
was  made  during  the  Great  War  by  the  United  States  Food 
Administration,  as  well  as  by  the  food  administrations  of  many 
other  countries.  The  great  rise  in  prices  was  a  contributory 
factor,  supplemented  in  some  cases  by  the  absolute  impossibility 
of  getting  food  from  the  old  sources  of  supply.  Some  of  the 
results  were  little  short  of  revolutionary. 

From  Hawaii  comes  the  statement  that  the  owners  of  sugar 
plantations  where  a  few  years  ago  sugar  alone  grew  and  almost 
everything  else  was  bought,  have  made  it  a  point  to  supply  the 
hundreds  of  workers  with  food  from  the  land  and  have  almost 
completely  succeeded.  The  campaign  to  "grow  your  own  food" 
has  resulted  in  a  material  reduction  of  Hawaii's  imports.  "It 
has  shown  that  much  of  the  food  sold  in  tin  cans  by  stores  for 
high  prices  may  be  grown  by  the  people  in  their  own  back  yards 
or  on  their  unused  lands  and  around  their  schoolhouses  with 
little  or  no  trouble."  * 

Even  more  suggestive  is  the  following  astonishing  state- 
ment by  the  American  consul  in  Trinidad,  writing  in  April, 
1918: 

The  Director  of  Agriculture  in  Trinidad  has  called  attention  to  the 
possibility  of  great  economy  as  regards  the  importation  of  foodstuffs 

*  World's  Market,  July,  1918. 


DO  WE  NEED  BREAD?  569 

into  this  colony,  as  shown  by  the  example  set  by  the  Diego  Martin 
Boys'  Reformatory,  in  this  island.  During  the  past  four  months  this 
institution  has  made  use  of  no  imported  food,  except  corn  meal,  and  the 
authorities  at  the  reformatory  state  that  never  again  will  imported 
foods  be  used  to  the  same  extent  as  in  the  past  if  ground  provisions 
(garden  produce)  are  obtainable.  It  has  been  found  that  the  native 
vegetables,  when  properly,  cooked  and  served,  are  more  appreciated  than 
the  former  diet. 

At  present  at  least  50  per  cent,  of  the  expense  of  feeding  the 
inmates  of  the  institution  (approximately  220)  is  being  saved  by  the 
use  of  locally  grown  food,  such  as  sweet  potatoes,  dasbeens,  tannias, 
yams,  eddoes,  pumpkins,  salad,  beans,  pigeon  peas,  ochroes,  melongenes, 
cassava,  and  farine.  For  two  meals  a  day  boiled  vegetables,  together 
with  salt  fish  or  meat,  are  served.  The  other  meal  consists  of  vegetable 
soup.  Breadfruit  forms  an  important  article  in  the  diet,  and  it  is 
important  to  note  that  bread  is  no  longer  used. 

The  authorities  of  the  reformatory  find  that  cassava  farine  forms  an 
excellent  article  of  food,  and  have  now  in  order  a  plant  made  on  the 
premises,  capable  of  grinding  2,000  pounds  of  cassava  per  week  and  of 
extracting  the  by-products  of  starch  and  farine. 


It  should  be  especially  noted  that  since  the  Anglo-Saxons  have 
applied  themselves  to  the  task  of  feeding  this  institution  from  the 
local  supply,  they  have  declared  their  independence  of  bread 
from  the  temperate  zone.  This  statement  should  be  pondered 
long  by  persons  who  have  been  alarmed  by  Sir  William  Crookes's 
insular  fear  of  famine  because  of  wheat  shortage.  The  experi- 
ences of  Hawaii,  of  Trinidad,  and  of  hundreds  of  other  localities 
during  the  war  gave  added  weight  to  the  conclusions  set  forth 
by  Mr.  Ross  as  a  result  of  his  food  survey  in  Altoona.  His 
plan  is  to  have  in  every  small  country  town  a  food  standardizing 
plant  to  serve  as  a  kind  of  food  clearing  house,  with  resultant 
improvement  in  quality,  reduction  in  price  to  local  consumers; 
increase  in  profit  to  the  producer,  and  great  increase  in  supply 
both  for  home  use  and  for  shipment  to  other  places.  These 
results  would  be  secured  by  the  following  means: 

I.  ESTABLISHING  STANDARD  VARIETIES  OF  MARKET  VEGETABLES 
GROWN  IN  THE  NEIGHBORHOOD  AND  PUT  UP  IN  STANDARD  PACK- 
AGES.— The  Danish  standardized  pig  and  the  standard  piece  of 
bacon  which  the  English  consumer  can  safely  buy  with  his  eyes 
shut  are  instances  in  point.  The  standardizing  plant  recom- 
mended by  Mr.  Ross  should  be  able  to  pack  the  products  of  a 


570     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

hundred  gardens  on  a  hundred  nearby  farms  or  back  yards, 
freely  commingling  them,  but  making  standard  packages  of  vege- 
tables of  the  same  variety,  picked  at  the  same  stage  of  ripeness 
and  thus  equally  acceptable  in  any  market  to  which  they  could 
be  easily  sent.  This  standardizing  house  with  its  standard  pack- 
age merely  copies  what  has  been  the  practice  for  years  in  Cali- 
fornia, Oregon,  and  Washington,  augmenting  the  success  of 
orange  and  apple  growers  and  greatly  increasing  the  consump- 
tion of  those  wholesome  fruits. 

II.  SUPPLYING  THE  HOME  MARKET  AND  DEVELOPING  EXPORT. 
—From  this  standardized  packing  plant  all  the  stores  and  house- 
holds of  the  town  would  be  supplied  with  the  freshest  of  good 
produce.  If  a  surplus  remained  it  could  be  shipped  to  nearby 
markets.  If  other  markets  were  not  available,  as  at  times  they 
are  not,  the  standardizing  plant  should  have  as  an  adjunct,  can- 
ning equipment  and  dehydrating  equipment,  so  that  no  food 
need  be  wasted.  The  people  of  the  town,  without  paying  freight, 
could  then  eat  throughout  the  winter  their  own  good  produce, 
prepared  in  their  own  local  plant  by  the  most  scientific  and 
hygienic  methods.  Any  surplus  in  excess  of  local  needs  could 
be  marketed  at  leisure.  Ten  years  from  now  there  should  be 
many  thousand  little  towns  using  good  fresh,  home-made  vege- 
table food  from  its  own  local  plant.  This  arrangement  would 
eliminate  the  waste  of  vegetables  so  common  in  farmers'  gardens, 
since  the  farmer  is  not  in  a  position  to  handle  a  small  surplus. 
It  would  stop  the  waste  of  labor  by  greatly  reducing  railroad 
transportation.  It  would  reduce  waste  of  work  and  of  lumber 
by  saving  the  making  of  thousands  of  packages.  It  would  reduce 
waste  of  labor  and  money  by  eliminating  the  middlemen's  work 
and  profits.  These  men  could  then  enrich  society  by  producing 
something,  whereas  some  of  them  now  live  only  by  doing  what 
might  be  avoided.  It  would  reduce  the  price  and  need  of  meat, 
because  people  would  have  more  abundant  and  satisfying  sup- 
plies of  substitute  foods.  By  giving  to  the  farmers  near  every 
center  of  population  the  local  market  for  twelve  months  in  the 
year,  it  would  aid  greatly  in  the  intensification  of  our  agriculture 
and  in  its  adjustment  to  need.  It  would  furnish  a  way  out  of 
the  difficulties  caused  by  shortage  of  freight  cars.  Such  a  plant 
would  give  the  small  town  its  natural  and  proper  advantage 


OUR  TRANSPORT  CHAOS  571 

of  a  lower  cost  of  good  living  than  that  prevailing  in  any  great 
city.* 

II.     ORGANIZING   THE   DISTANT    MARKET 

This  development  of  the  local  food  supply  with  the  primary 
object  of  supplying  local  needs,  would  satisfactorily  end  the 
thirty-five-cent  dollar  situation,  at  least  in  the  town  and  small 
city.  The  securing  of  perishable  food  from  nearby  fields  and 
local  plants  would  bring  the  consumer's  dollar  down  to  seventy- 
five  or  eighty  cents,  and  put  the  farmer's  share  of  it  up  to  fifty 
or  fifty-five  cents.  But  what  about  the  surplus,  the  large  sur- 
plus, that  the  small  town  cannot  use?  Shall  it  be  sent  in  every 
direction,  conflicting  with  similar  supplies  from  other  towns, 
as  is  now  the  practice  in  the  United  States,  where  the  apples  of 
Missouri  go  to  New  York,  and  the  apples  of  New  York  go  to 
Iowa? 

The  second  feature  of  this  plan  for  organizing  the  market  is 
the  establishment  of  an  efficient  and  honest  information  service 
which  will  enable  both  shippers  and  purchasers  to  know  the  sup- 
plies and  demands,  so  that  food  may  move  most  directly  to  places 
where  it  is  needed.  At  present  both  information  concerning 
markets,  and  the  supply  for  the  markets  is  unreliable;  conse- 
quently one  market  is  glutted,  disappointing  the  farmers,  while 
another  nearby  market  is  nearly  empty,  disappointing  the  would- 
be  purchasers.  For  example,  in  1917,  good  peaches  sold  at  from 
forty  to  sixty  cents  a  basket  near  Bordentown,  New  Jersey, 
twenty  miles  up  the  river  from  Philadelphia,  while  at  the  same 
time  similar  fruit  was  bringing  $2.00  a  basket  in  the  New  Jersey 
towns  suburban  to  New  York.  With  proper  information  service 
the  cheap  peaches  would  have  been  sent  to  the  high-priced  mar- 
ket, with  the  result  that  prices  would  have  been  somewhat  higher 
for  producers  and  somewhat  lower  for  purchasers;  all  parties 
would  have  benefited.  Consumption  as  well  as  production  would 
have  been  increased.  An  attempt  to  establish  such  an  informa- 
tion system  in  one  of  our  largest  Eastern  States  was  frustrated 
by  commission  men,  who  feared  that  this  great  service  would 
interfere  with  their  personal  profits. 

*  For  further  consideration,  see  Annals  of  the  American  Academy  of 
Political  and  Social  Science,  November,  1917. 


572     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

The  movement  of  food  a  minimum  distance  would  be  an 
enormous  relief  to  railway  congestion  and  should  bring  ma- 
terial reduction  in  cost  of  food,  as  well  as  improvement  in 
quality. 

The  adoption  of  such  plans  would  make  a  recognizable  dif- 
ference in  the  cost  of  living  both  in  those  towns  that  depend 
chiefly  upon  the  local  supply  and  in  those  that  depend  chiefly 
upon  railroad  supplies.  Pressure  brought  to  bear  on  the  locality 
to  produce  its  own  supplies  would  help  to  put  an  end  to  the  amaz- 
ing conditions  to  be  seen  in  and  near  almost  any  large  city  in  the 
United  States,  and  to  some  extent  in  other  parts  of  the  world. 
New  York  City  imports  every  day  hundreds  of  carloads  of  sup- 
plies, most  of  which  have  crossed  the  north  Jersey  marshes, 
thousands  of  acres  of  rich,  black  muck  soil,  with  a  riotous  growth 
of  cattails,  shoulder  high.  This  land  is  ideal  truck  land,  much 
easier  to  reclaim  than  the  lands  of  Holland.  It  is  literally  in  sight 
and  even  within  sound  of  the  city  where  reside  millions  of  people 
who  would  eat  every  ounce  of  any  kind  of  edible  produce  that 
these  thousands  of  acres  of  waste  land  might  produce.  A  similar 
situation  prevails  near  Philadelphia  and  Washington,  and  is 
really  typical  of  the  Western  World  during  its  present  orgy  of 
transportation  and  unorganized  individualism. 

Our  use  of  railroads  is  typical  of  our  method  of  developing 
a  social  problem  out  of  almost  every  new  invention.  The  new 
invention  is  good.  It  makes  money  for  the  user,  displaces  his 
old  rival,  and  creates  industrial  and  commercial  change.  This 
in  a  few  years  we  discover  has  injured  somebody  or  some  group 
of  persons,  whose  injury  can  be  remedied  only  by  the  action  of 
society.  But  society  is  hard  to  move,  whereas  the  individual 
acting  for  profit  moves  quickly  and  easily.  Thus  the  railroad 
has  been  used  to  make  profits  for  its  owners.  Rate  competitions, 
rate  wars,  railroad  compromises,  have  given  competitive  points 
cheaper  rates  than  points  along  the  line,  with  the  result  that  men 
of  the  Western  World  live  in  great  masses,  in  cities  of  hundreds 
of  thousands  and  millions,  while  hundreds  of  miles  of  railroad 
track  reach  out  through  almost  empty  land  and  we  have  the 
contradictory  problems  of  abandoned  farms,  overcrowded  cities, 
and  insufficient  food.  If  we  apply  to  these  problems  the  same 
quality  of  brains  and  the  same  degree  of  organization  that  we 


OUR  CITIES— AN  ECONOMIC  INSANITY  573 

used  in  feeding  the  armies  in  France,  the  cost  of  living  will  come 
tumbling  down  as  prosperity  increases. 


IIL    CHANGING  THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  MANKIND  WITH  REFERENCE  TO 
'RESOURCES  AND  CLIMATE 

1.  T~he  Making  over  of  Our  Cities. — Now  that  the  Great  War 
is  over,  we  may  expect  scientific  study  of  markets  and  resources. 
The  increased  attention  to  human  welfare  that  we  may  also 
expect  should  now  cause  us  to  act  on  three  important  discoveries 
with  regard  to  the  modern  city. 

a.  The  present  big  city  is  too  big  to  furnish  good  food  supply  at 
a  reasonable  price. 

b.  It  is  too  big  to  maintain  good  living  conditions. 

c.  It  provides  no  social  advantage  to  offset  the  greater  cost  of  food 
and  the  poorer  living  conditions. 

The  present  big  city  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  unused  distant 
lands  on  the  other,  are  results  of  a  period  when  individualism 
ran  unchecked  and  society  was  organized  on  the  basis  of  in- 
dividual profit  rather  than  of  service.  If  this  war  will  teach  us 
anything,  it  will  teach  us  to  draw  the  contrast  between  profits 
and  service,  business  and  living.  Business  is  not  a  life,  certainly 
not  a  family  life,  although  when  a  man  becomes  engrossed  in  it, 
it  may  fill  life  for  him.  The  young  men  of  America  have  gone 
out  by  the  millions  to  die,  if  need  be,  that  the  world  might  be 
free  rather  than  subject  to  the  orders  of  a  despot.  Their  sacrifice 
surely  implies  that  in  the  city,  the  country,  the  earth,  all  man- 
kind should  have  opportunity  to  live  rather  than  that  a  few 
should  have  opportunity  to  profit  at  the  expense  of  all  the  others. 

This  idea  involves  an  entirely  new  point  of  view  from  which 
to  regard  the  utilization  of  the  earth.  If  man  must  fight  to  keep 
it  free  politically,  so  he  must  use  brains  and  fight  with  ideas  and 
votes  to  keep  it  free  industrially,  that  men,  and  above  all  boys 
and  girls,  may  live  rather  than  exist,  may  be  healthy  and  strong 
instead  of  sickly  and  weak. 

"What  does  the  scientific  utilization  of  the  earth  as  the  home  of 
man  demand  ?  Shall  we  continue  to  allow,  on  the  one  hand,  slums 


574     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

and  hopelessly  crowded  cities,  and,  on  the  other,  empty  country 
from  which  man  flees  because  of  loneliness  ?  Shall  we  continue  to 
let  cities  grow  up  helter-skelter  to  be  economic  cancers,  or  shall  we 
demand  the  scientifically  planned  city  community,  the  scientifi- 
cally planned  country  community,  just  as  we  have  scientifically 
planned  factories  and  scientifically  planned  ships  and  scientifi- 
cally planned  armies? 

When  an  architect  designs  a  factory,  he  lays  down  on  the 
table  before  him  a  list  of  the  various  functions  of  the  factory 
and  then  proceeds  from  these  known  needs  to  plan  the  structure 
which  will  best  meet  them.  It  is  strange  that,  despite  our  thou- 
sands of  years  of  experience  with  cities,  there  have  been  few 
attempts  to  apply  large-scale  planning  to  the  city  as  a  func- 
tioning unit.  Is  it  any  more  desirable  that  a  city  should  grow 
indefinitely  large  than  that  a  man  should  grow  indefinitely  large  ? 
Perhaps  most  of  us  as  children  have  wished  that  we  were  as 
big  as  giants  so  that  we  might  pick  up  certain  undesirable 
persons  between  our  fingers  and  place  them  where  they  belonged. 
Is  the  world-wide  desire  of  cities  to  grow  big,  big,  big,  any  more 
sensible?  A  city  exists  in  order  to  perform  certain  functions, 
and,  when  it  is  big  enough  to  perform  them,  additional  size  is 
of  no  more  value  than  an  additional  one  hundred  pounds  to  a 
man  who  already  weighs  one  hundred  and  eighty. 

Mr.  Ebenezer  Howard,  an  Englishman,  the  world's  greatest 
planner  of  towns,  drew  up  the  plans  of  an  ideal  city.  He  first 
analyzed  the  situation.  The  city  affords  to  its  inhabitants,  social 
opportunity,  to  the  factory,  the  labor  market,  but  it  tends  in- 
evitably to  become  congested.  On  the  other  hand,  the  advan- 
tages of  the  country  are  cheap  sites  and  room  for  plants  in  the 
yard  and  garden,  room  to  play,  fresh  air,  and  nearness  to  food 
supplies,  but  lack  of  social  opportunity  and  opportunity  for 
employment.  Having  listed  these  considerations,  Mr.  Howard 
proceeded  to  plan  a  city  in  which  the  inhabitants  would  be  (1) 
so  near  to  the  factories  that  they  could  walk  to  their  jobs,  (2) 
so  near  to  the  shops  that  they  could  walk  and  carry  their  pur- 
chases if  they  chose,  (3)  so  near  to  open  space  that  they  could 
easily  walk  to  the  farms,  fields,  and  playgrounds,  yet  (4)  suf- 
'ficiently  numerous  to  furnish  the  labor  supply  for  factories, 
which,  after  all,  is  the  economic  object  of  the  city.  These  ends 


A  REAL  GARDEN  CITY   t.  575 

could  only  be  attained  by  having  a  definite  size  and  plan  for  the 
city,  with  limitation  of  the  population. 

It  is  most  encouraging  to  know  that  we  can  accomplish  all  this 
without  any  more  gigantic  reform  than  the  use  of  common  sense. 
We  need  only  apply  our  well-established  principles  of  building 
restrictions,  and  prevent  crowding  by  limiting  the  size  of  lots  to 
a  certain  minimum  and  then  limiting  the  proportion  of  a  lot  that 
may  be  covered  by  a  house.  Thus  Mr.  Howard  maintained  that 
the  city  would  be  full  grown  with  a  population  of  about  thirty- 
two  thousand.  After  this  city  was  full,  further  needs  for  resi- 
dence could  be  met  by  building  another  city  nearby,  just  as  we 
build  suburban  stations  on  the  railroad.  In  Mr.  Howard's  ideal 
plan  about  six  thousand  acres  are  required  for  the  city,  of  which 
about  half  are  left  for  farms,  and  the  rest  are  laid  out  in  streets 
and  lots. 

This  story  is  not  the  record  of  a  plan,  a  hope,  a  vision.  It  is 
already  an  achievement:  for  the  city  has  been  built.  After 
much  hard  work,  Mr.  Howard  succeeded  in  forming  a  Garden 
City  Association.  About  fifteen  years  ago  the  association  bought 
about  four  thousand  acres  of  farm  land  forty  miles  north  of 
London  in  Hertfordshire  on  one  of  the  great  railroads  and  pro- 
ceeded to  lay  out  the  central  part  as  a  factory  town.  The  plan 
has  succeeded.  In  the  nine  years  between  1904  and  1913  about 
thirty  factories  moved  to  the  place,  which  had  a  population  of 
eight  thousand  in  1913  and  was  steadily  growing.  The  crucial 
test,  however,  of  its  success  is  the  balance  sheet.  It  was  financed 
by  a  group  of  individuals  who  were  willing  to  put  up  some 
money,  buy  the  land,  and  get  their  five  per  cent,  cumulative 
dividends  eventually  if  the  plan  succeeded.  According  to  the 
English  custom,  long  leases  were  given  to  land,  which  the  tenants 
were  to  improve.  The  company  bought  at  farm  values  and 
rented  at  low  town  values.  Thus  the  cottager  who  bought  the 
lease  of  a  plot  paid  perhaps  $10  a  year  for  the  lot ;  but  as  there 
were  seven  or  eight  such  lots  per  acre,  the  income  on  the  original 
purchase  price  of  $200  was  ample.  The  leases  which  had  been 
sold  when  the  town  was  one-quarter  grown,  caused  the  balance 
sheet  for  the  year  1912  to  show  a  profit.  The  financial  plan  pro- 
vides that  the  promoters  shall  get  five  per  cent.,  and  that  further 
profits  shall  revert  to  the  city  for  improvements  and  reduction 


576     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

of  taxes.  One  of  the  manufacturers  told  me  that  he  could  fore- 
see the  time  when  the  town  would  be  without  taxes,  and  that 
then  "the  manufactures  will  come  here  in  droves." 

It  is  the  most  beautiful  factory  town  I  have  ever  seen,  because 
every  house-lot  has  room  enough  for  flowers  in  front  and  vege- 
tables in  the  rear.  There  are  never  more  than  twelve  lots  to  the 
acre,  so  that  lots  can  be  practically  20  x  200  feet,  even  in  sections 
given  over  to  the  artisan.  There  is  room  for  a  small  front  yard, 
cottage  site,  and  little  back  yard,  with  100  x  20  feet  left  for 
garden.  A  labor  agitator  with  whom  I  had  a  long  interview 
told  me  that  he  could  estimate  how  long  a  man  had  lived  there 
by  looking  at  his  garden :  in  the  first  year  after  arriving  from 
London,  he  does  not  do  much ;  then  summer  comes,  and  the 
neighbors  begin  to  hand  vegetables  across  the  line ;  the  next  year 
he  makes  a  start ;  and  by  the  third  year  his  garden  begins  to  be 
of  some  real  value. 

Inasmuch  as  the  town  is  definitely  planned,  it  has  ample 
factory  districts  on  railroad  sidings,  and,  on  each  side  of  these, 
a  large  district  given  over  to  cottages  for  factory  workers.  This 
region  is  reserved  for  factory  workers  by  building  restrictions, 
which  fix  a  minimum  and  a  maximum  cost  for  houses.  Beyond 
this  district  in  both  directions  are  larger  lots  for  the  middle 
class  with  higher  rent  and  different  building  restrictions.  On 
the  highest  ground  still  farther  away  from  the  factories  are  yet 
larger  and  more  expensive  lots  where  factory  owners  and  persons 
of  wealth  have  their  beautiful  homes.  Near  the  station  is  the 
shopping  district,  and  immediately  across  from  it  is  a  seventy- 
acre  playground.  Several  smaller  playgrounds  of  twelve,  five, 
three,  and  one-half  acres  are  scattered  about.  This  city  is,  so 
far  as  I  know,  the  only  town  of  its  size  in  the  world  which  makes 
public  provision  for  the  play  of  any  large  percentage  of  its 
population.  As  the  limitation  of  population  is  insured  by  build- 
ing restrictions,  accessibility  and  play  space  are  permanent 
features. 

Just  beyond  the  factory  district  are  the  farm  holdings.  Per- 
haps Mr.  Howard's  dream  of  a  town  that  combines  the  advan- 
tages of  both  city  and  country  will  come  true.  It  had  certainly 
made  a  good  start  before  the  Great  War,  and  the  war  has  given 
it  an  impetus  by  focusing  attention  on  man-power. 


THE  PRODUCTIVE  SMALL  GARDEN 


577 


The  people  of  this  town  have  almost  unique  opportunities  to 
develop  health,  muscle,  character,  and  wealth  through  by- 
industry.  They  have  a  chance  to  duplicate  the  conditions  of 
the  artisan's  life  before  the  factories  came.  The  boys  and  girls 
can  dig  the  gardens,  since  the  age  for  beginning  factory  labor 
is  being  postponed  by  legislation.  This  opportunity  to  cultivate 
a  garden,  and  to  raise  poultry  and  rabbits,  also  brings  health, 


FIG.  139.— A  vacant  lot  near  the  Wallach  School,  Washington,  D.  C., 
that  was  converted  into  a  good  vegetable  garden  by  seventeen  school- 
boys. It  was  105  feet  by  32  feet,  and  produced  vegetables  in  1917  worth 
$125.  (U.  S.  Dept.  Agr.) 

wealth,  and  solace  to  the  old.  Back  of  a  beautifully  embowered 
yard  lives  a  retired  engine  driver.  Behind  his  cottage  is  one 
of  the  most  productive  bits  of  garden,  50  x  40  feet,  that  I  have 
ever  seen.  The  old  man  had  driven  locomotives  in  England  and 
in  India  until  he  had  saved  enough  money  to  retire.  Then  he 
settled  down  in  garden  city  to  see  folks  and  obey  Jehovah's 
mandate  to  dig — when  he  felt  like  it.  If  a  garden  city  family 
wishes  to  engage  in  market  gardening  on  the  side,  small  holdings 
can  be  rented  just  beyond  the  town  limit.  It  is  not  necessary 
to  pay  city  lot  rent.  The  land  is  not  suburban,  it  is  farm  land, 
so  denominated  in  the  contract. 


578     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

The  definite  plan  of  this  garden  city  saves  it  from  the 
endless  turmoil  of  reconstruction  which  a  planless,  indefi- 
nitely growing  city  encounters,  when  each  section  has  a 
different  use  with  every  generation.  Under  prevailing  con- 
ditions, each  generation  tears  down  what  the  previous  gen- 
eration built  to  last  for  many  decades.  Thus  in  Phila- 
delphia, New  York,  London,  Paris,  and  Tokyo,  the  business 
section  is  invading  the  residence  section,  either  using  awkward 
but  substantial  old  residences,  or  tearing  down  good  structures 
and  building  anew.  The  unscientific  city  has  swamped  itself. 
A  succession  of  suburbs  of  a  growing  city  are  given  over  to  new 
uses.  Because  the  owners  expect  in  a  short  time  to  sell  for 
building  purposes,  land  is  held  for  high  prices;  and  the  chief 
function  of  American  land  that  should  be  in  crops  and  play- 
grounds is  the  support  of  " for  sale"  signs.  Around  garden  city 
is  a  belt  of  farms  and  playgrounds,  which,  since  it  is  definitely 
set  apart  for  these  uses,  has  and  can  have  no  sale  value ;  in  this 
respect  it  resembles  our  parks. 

The  most  significant  feature  of  the  whole  project  is  that  it 
has  been  carried  out  by  the  application  of  existing  practices, 
existing  laws,  and  existing  human  science.  Most  attempts  at 
social  reconstruction  have  to  await  a  conversion  of  the  majority 
to  a  new  point  of  view;  and  if  the  dreams  of  the  constructive 
socialist  are  to  come  true,  we  must  develop  also  an  entirely  new 
system  and  type  of  business  administration.  But  a  garden  city 
like  Letchworth,  England,  can  be  built  now  in  any  well-chosen 
location.  There  is  plenty  of  room  along  the  Delaware  River  for 
all  the  industrial  population  now  near  it  (and  much  more)  to 
avail  themselves  of  the  principles  of  the  garden  city,  and  to  have 
good  instead  of  poor  access  to  the  harbor. 

Such  a  city  would  beyond  a  doubt  reduce  the  cost  of  living 
by  means  of  lower  rents  and  better  and  cheaper  food;  increase 
wealth  by  means  of  by-industry;  increase  pleasure  by  promoting 
recreation;  increase  efficiency  as  a  result  of  increased  health. 
The  land  speculator  alone  would  be  the  loser — he  would  lose  his 
present  much  too  wide-spread  opportunity  to  take  something  and 
give  nothing  in  return. 

Letchworth  was  built  chiefly  because  the  English  nation  was 
alarmed  by  the  discoveries  of  the  officers  who  tried  to  recruit  an 


GARDEN  CITY  FOOD  579 

army  to  fight  the  Boer  War  (1899-1902).  They  were  shocked  to 
find  that  the  average  recruit  who  came  out  of  the  mill  towns  was 
physically  unfit,  narrow-chested,  undersized,  underweight,  with 
bad  teeth.  He  belonged  to  the  second  or  third  generation  of  city 
workers  who  had  grown  up  in  little  two-story  houses,  practically 
without  garden,  play  space,  or  access  to  the  country. 

The  social  prophets  saw  that  such  conditions  must  be  remedied. 
If  they  succeeded  with  one  garden  city  in  the  first  decade  of 
the  twentieth  century,  what  may  we  expect  in  the  next  two 
decades  after  the  Great  War,  when  man  with  the  return  of 
peace  realizes  the  importance  of  man-power  and  health  and  the 
value  of  a  home  where  a  boy  can  have  play  space,  garden  and 
pets,  where  the  whole  family  can  have  a  garden  and  access  to 
the  earth  and  green  things? 

2.  Garden  Cities  and  the  Food  Supply. — The  problem  of  food 
alone  should  be  sufficient  incentive  to  the  whole  world  to  build 
garden  cities  rather  than  to  enlarge  the  pavement  cities  of  the 
present.  In  Letchworth  every  boy  and  girl  may  have  a  garden. 
The  family  garden,  which  was  undertaken  for  the  first  time  by 
thousands  of  families  during  the  war,  has  there  a  chance  to  be- 
come a  permanent  asset.  In  addition  to  its  promotion  of  health, 
morals,  and  the  pleasure  it  gives  those  who  love  the  earth  and 
growing  things,  it  affords  substantial  increase  of  income.  A 
study  of  cotton  mill  towns  in  the  American  South  (United  States 
Department  of  Agriculture,  Bulletin  602)  shows  that,  of  the 
cases  studied,  thirty-five  out  of  one  hundred  and  forty- four 
families  with  gardens  averaging  four  hundred  square  feet  raised 
supplies  about  equal  to  the  rent  they  paid  for  their  homes.  In 
Letchworth  the  gardens  with  the  smallest  houses  had  from  sixteen 
hundred  to  two  thousand  square  feet.  In  Bulletin  936  of  the 
United  States  Department  of  Agriculture  are  cited  boys'  and 
girls'  home  club  gardens:  a  group  of  twelve  with  gardens  of 
less  than  five  hundred  square  feet  produced  two  and  one-fourth 
cents  income  per  square  foot.  Thus  income  was  calculated  on 
fixed  and  very  reasonable  prices,  of  which  the  following  axe 

typical : 

String  Beans    30c  a  peck 

Beets  50c  a  peck 

Greens  25c  a  peck 

Potatoes  30c  a  peck 


580     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 


In  Philadelphia,  the  Vacant  Lots  Association,  which  has  aided 
school  children  and  others  to  cultivate  very  small  plots,  found 
that  a  youngster  could  sometimes  make  as  much  as  ten  cents  a 


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Fro.  140. — Distribution  of  city  workers  of  Liege  to  village  homes. 
Figures  represent  number  going  from  each  station  to  Liege,  June  1-5,  1906. 
Small  agriculture  is  added  to  factory  wages.  By  trades:  miners  1,832, 
factory  men  2,871,  building  trades  1,440,  unskilled  1,493,  dress-makers  and 
milliners  360,  apprentices  242,  other  trades  1,167,  railway  workmen  520, 
total  9,925,  of  whom  5,830  went  daily  and  4,095  weekly.  (From  Land 
and  Labor,  by  B.  S.  Rowntree.)  In  1914,  Belgium  was  ahead  of  any  other 
Western  nation  in  the  scientific  utilization  of  her  resources.  Her  factory 
workers  live  upon  the  land  to  a  degree  unknown  elsewhere.  With  his 
plot  of  ground  there  is  room  for  production  by  the  aid  of  women  and 
children,  old  persons,  and  the  spare  time  of  the  artisan  himself.  This 
garden  product,  the  poultry,  hares,  and  possibly  the  cows,  are  great  addi- 
tions to  a  low  wage  and  they  conduce  to  the  intensity  of  culture  that 
gives  large  return  per  unit  of  land,  It  also  gives  a  love  of  home  that 
made  the  people  hard  to  trample  underfoot  when  Germany  tried  it. 

square  foot  at  pre-war  prices.  This  was  done,  however,  by  grow- 
ing several  crops  in  a  season,  of  which  the  yield  is  large  and  the 
family  need  is  small ;  and  sales  were  made  at  retail  prices. 


LONG-DISTANCE  FOOD  581 

3.  Distance  Classification  of  Foods. — The  proposed  scientific 
distribution  of  man  on  the  land  in  a  garden  city  and  its  tributary 
farms  indicates  that  there  are  several  classes  of  food,  based  on 
the  distance  which  it  may,  to  best  advantage,  be  transported 
without  deterioration  or  excessive  cost. 

a.  The  first  class  is  food  produced  in  the  immediate  vicinity 
and  transported  by  the  farmer's  wagon  or  motor  truck.  The 
immediate  vicinity  includes  the  farm  zone  two  to  five,  or  even 
ten  miles  wide,  around  the  garden  city.  It  is  an  area  sufficient 
to  produce  all  the  garden  stuff  needed  by  the  city  in  season  and 
a  considerable  surplus  for  canning  and  drying.  Facilities  for 
drying  may  be  provided  so  that  a  basket  of  pears  or  tomatoes 
can  be  put  on  a  shelf  of  a  drier  and  exposed  to  currents  of  warm 
air  driven  by  an  electric  fan.  With  such  facilities  a  single  care- 
taker can  look  after  hundreds  of  drying  shelves  for  an  indefinite 
number  of  patrons  who  may  have  such  shelves  as  they  have  lock- 
boxes  in  the  post-office.  This  immediate  vicinity  can  also  pro- 
duce some  of  the  milk,  all  of  the  small  fruits  in  season,  some 
tree  fruits,  and  most  of  the  eggs,  poultry,  and  potatoes  (if  the 
climate  is  suitable). 

It  is  suggestive  that  twenty-five  or  thirty  community  dehy- 
.drators  worked  in  Nebraska  in  the  summer  of  1918.  Mr.  Lou 
Sweet  of  the  United  States  Food  Administration  says  they  made 
better  product  than  common  drying,  better  than  canned  goods, 
and  excellent  for  home  use,  but  cannot  compete  with  large 
thoroughly  organized  plant  for  general  commercial  work. 

We  cannot  claim  to  be  sole  discoverers  of  the  art  of  drying  food. 
Dr.  Joseph  Beech,  Methodist  Missionary,  president  of  West 
China  University,  at  Chengtu,  in  the  province  of  Szechuan,  re- 
cently returned  to  this  country,  says  of  a  strange  people  he 
recently  visited  near  the  boundary  of  Tibet,  ''They  have  huge 
smokestacks  in  their  communities  which  gave  them  the  appear- 
ance of  thriving  industrial  cities.  When  we  arrived  we  found 
they  were  employed  solely  for  the  purpose  of  drying  and  curing 
vegetables,  meat,  and  fish,  which  were  suspended  tier  upon  tier 
the  entire  height  of  the  chimney." 

&.  The  second  class  is  food  produced  from  ten  to  fifty  miles 
away  and  transported  by  motor  express  or  farmer's  truck. 
It  is  very  difficult  for  us  to  appreciate  the  social  and  agricultural 


582     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

results  that  are  to  come  from  the  use  of  the  motor  truck  in  city 
food  supply.  It  is  said  that  the  Allies  won  the  war  with  the 
motor  truck.  The  period  of  the  war  has  shown  us  that  woman 
may  become  a  teamster  when  she  tries  and  drive  twenty  horses 
rather  than  two.  Within  this  motor-truck  zone  should  be  pro- 
duced the  rest  of  the  milk  (although  the  cows  come  from  distant 
ranges  when  they  are  grown  and  ready  to  enter  the  dairy),  most 
of  the  tree  fruits  such  as  apples  and  peaches  (if  climate  permits), 


Illinois _ ....1890  -  55.2 

1900  -  45.7 
1910  -  38.3 

New  York. _ 1899  -  35.0 

1900  -  27.1 
1910  -  21.2 

Pennsylvania 1890  -  51.4 

1900  -  45.3 
1910  -  39.6 


FIG.  141. — Rural  population:  per  cent,  of  totals.  The  supply  of  ma- 
chine-made agricultural  products  has  combined  with  the  factory  lure  to 
cause  a  steady  decline  in  the  proportion  of  our  population  that  lives  on 
farms.  This  shows  a  part  of  the  process  of  development  of  certain 
regions  as  food-producing  regions,  while  others  become  manufacturing 
regions. 

the  remainder  of  the  potatoes,  most  of  the  eggs  and  poultry,  and 
perhaps  small  quantities  of  grain  and  red  meat,  especially 
pork. 

c.  The  third  class  is  food  produced  in  localities  from  fifty  to 
fifteen  thousand  miles  distant  and  transported  by  train  and 
ships.  These  long  distances  and  the  greater  cost  of  transporta- 
tion are  no  bar  to  the  carriage  of  goods  having  good  keeping 
quality  and  small  bulk  per  dollar's  worth.  This  list  includes 
meat,  fish,  butter,  cheese,  breadstuffs,  dried  legumes,  dried  fruits, 
canned  goods,  nuts  and  vegetable  fats,  exotic  products  such  as 
oranges,  lemons,  bananas,  and  a  whole  host  of  tropic  fruits  that 
we  may  get  whenever  we  are  ready  to  enlarge  our  bill  of  fare 
and  establish  new  industries. 

No  part  of  the  world  is  too  far  away  to  help  supply  the  well 
located  garden  city  with  these  staples. 


THE  PROPER  CITY  LOCATION  583 

4.  The  Location  of  Man's  Home  with  Regard  to  Accessibility 
and  Inaccessibility. — The  foregoing  discussion  of  food  carriage 
implies  that  some  localities  should  become  garden  cities  because 
water  transport  makes  it  easy  to  bring  in  food  and  raw  material 
and  to  take  away  factory  products  to  distant  markets.  Other 
localities  should  consist  of  farms,  whole  states  and  kingdoms  of 
them,  producing  staples  for  distant  consumption.  The  economies 
of  transportation  seem  to  promise  such  a  distribution  of  popula- 
tion if  we  are  to  live  with  least  waste  of  effort.  The  manu- 
facturing city  must  import  raw  materials  and  staple  foods.  It 
should  therefore  have  the  best  locality  for  import,  namely,  access 
to  the  sea.  A  manufacturing  city  in  the  heart  of  a  riverless 
plain  must  have  the  same  imports  as  the  city  by  the  sea,  but 
these  must  come  long  distances  over  land,  and  land  transport  is 
more  costly  than  water  transport.  This  seems  to  indicate  that 
the  water-front  locations  (sea,  river,  and  canal),  especially  those 
having  soil  and  climate  suitable  for  the  production  of  truck, 
small  fruits,  and  milk,  should  become  almost  one  continuous  series 
of  garden  cities,  while  the  continental  interiors,  such  as  the 
plains  of  central  Russia,  Siberia,  Australia,  Argentina,  western 
United  States,  and  Canada  should  carry  on  an  intensive-exten- 
sive agriculture  with  only  enough  manufacturing  to  meet  some 
local  needs  and  to  keep  busy  that  part  of  the  population  that  is 
dependent  upon  agriculture  but  not  directly  engaged  in  it.  This 
is  nothing  more  than  the  continuation  of  a  process  that  has 
already  begun.  The  last  twenty  years  have  seen  the  population 
remain  almost  absolutely  static  in  Iowa,  a  matchless  interior 
agricultural  region,  while  New  England,  with  its  many  harbors, 
has  rapidly  increased  its  population  because  it  is  engaged  in 
manufacturing  in  a  good  commercial  location.  The  significance 
of  the  advantage  in  transport  afforded  by  waterway  is  well 
proved  by  the  fact  observed  by  some  students  of  marketing  that 
ten  per  cent,  decrease  in  price  of  a  commodity  will  double  its 
consumption. 

The  easy  distribution  of  electric  power  to  every  home  in 
whole  communities  gives  to  even  interior  localities  the  pos- 
sibility of  restoring  the  epoch  of  home  industry,  but  this  time 
on  a  power-driven  rather  than  muscle-driven  basis.  There  is 
no  reason  why  the  housewife  in  Iowa,  Saskatchewan,  or  upper 


584     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

Volga  may  not  turn  the  electric  power  from,  the  washing  ma- 
chine to  the  knitting  machine,  and  do  a  half-dozen  pairs  of 
socks  before  John  or  Ivan  comes  in  to  supper  on  his  motor 
plow.  Material  for  socks  is  easily  carried,  but  too  much  of  it 
makes  a  city,  and  the  land-freight  city  is  at  a  permanent  dis- 
advantage while  wheels  and  keels  compete. 

Thus  the  accessibility  of  the  seacoast  regions  promises  to  make 
them  eventually  the  great  hives  of  population,  whereas  the  level 
interior  will  consist  of  farms  with  towns  and  small  cities. 

Inland  waterways  of  the  first  class  will,  of  course,  go  far  to 
emancipate  any  interior  locations  which  they  reach,  such  as  the 
banks  of  the  Mississippi,  the  Ohio,  the  Great  Lakes,  the  Rhine, 
the  Danube,  the  Elbe,  the  Columbia,  the  Yangtse-Kiang. 

5.  Locating  Our  Homes  with  Regard  to  Classes  of  Climate. — 
Climate  is  another  factor  that  promises  to  help  distribute  man's 
city  areas  and  his  farm  areas.  There  are  some  climates  which 
stimulate  man  to  do  all  he  can.  There  are  others  in  which  he 
tends  to  do  as  little  as  he  can.  The  one  will  develop  cities  pro- 
ducing highly  fabricated  products,  the  other  will  develop  farms 
producing  raw  materials. 

a.  Climates  in  Which  Man  Does  All  He  Can. — Professor  Ells- 
worth Huntington,  of  Yale,  has  written  several  books  giving  elab- 
orate evidence  that  man  uses  his  mind  best  at  a  temperature  of 
about  40°  ;  that  he  works  with  his  body  most  and  most  pleasur- 
ably  when  the  temperature  is  about  64°  ;  and  that  he  is  much 
more  energetic,  more  healthful,  longer  lived  in  places  where  the 
climate  has  frequent  small  changes  of  temperature  from  day  to 
day,  such  as  accompany  the  weather  cycle  prevalent  in  northern 
and  northeastern  United  States  and  northwestern  Europe.  In 
these  regions  the  movement  of  the  cyclonic  storm  brings  today 
gentle  south  winds,  tomorrow  clouds,  the  next  day  rain  or  snow, 
the  following  day  northwest  winds,  followed  by  moderating  sun- 
shiny days;  then  comes  the  south  wind  and  the  repetition  of 
this  cycle,  which,  according  to  Dr.  Huntington,  is  the  magneto 
by  which  nature  starts  up  man  and  makes  an  engine  of  him. 
In  lands  that  are  constantly  warm,  man  does  not  want  to  work 
and  he  does  not  work  so  much  as  in  the  changeable  climate. 
Much  more  surprising  to  most  of  us  is  Huntington 's  conclusion 
that  man  also  slows  down  in  lands  that  are  constantly  cold,  as 


DOES  CLIMATE  MAKE  CIVILIZATION?  585 


ne      fee      tto       no      tee       ft>       t»      to       u        «        to      to       to       to 


700        110      1*0 


Fio.  142. — Distribution  of  human  energy  as  produced  by  climatic  influ- 
ence, and  measured  by  Dr.  Huntington's  experiments  and  observations. 
(From  Climate  and  Civilization,  by  Ellsworth  Huntington.) 


itc     m       HO        no      roe       »«        t* 


40       co      eo       too      nt     n»     Ht     ut 


Fio.  143. — Distribution  of  civilization  according  to  the  opinion  of  a 
large  number  of  men  of  wide  knowledge,  as  held  before  the  outbreak  of 
the  Great  War.  ( From  Climate  and  Civilization,  by  Ellsworth  Huntingtoa. ) 


586     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

the  winter  of  mid-Russia  and  Siberia  and  the  land  of  the  Eskimos. 
It  is  only  in  the  lands  of  moderate  climate  and  changes  that  man 
becomes  a  dynamo  with  the  strength  and  desire  to  work  and  the 
great  love  of  achievement  that  builds  great  cities,  elaborate 
civilizations,  and  far-reaching  empires. 

After  all  it  can  scarcely  be  said  that  this  is  mere  theory.  It 
but  explains  what  men  have  known  for  generations  and  what 
history  has  shown  for  ages.  The  face  of  the  conquering  king 
on  the  coinage  of  dead  kingdoms  from  India  to  Portugal  is  the 
face  of  a  man  of  the  north  who  has  flung  himself  with  energy  on 
southern  people  who  have  been  unable  to  resist  him ;  but  his  line 
in  turn  succumbed  to  some  other  northern  conqueror.  A  student 
of  history  can  find  five  cases  of  northern  people  conquering 
southern  people  to  one  in  which  the  situation  is  reversed.  The 
delightful  people  of  southern  United  States  chide  the  Yankee  of 
the  North  for  his  restless  energy  and  too  great  devotion  to  work, 
and  frankly  tell  him  when  he  comes  into  their  midst  that  he  will 
learn  in  time  to  move  more  slowly  in  their  climate — and  he  does. 
I  have  been  in  no  country  as  much  as  three  hundred  miles  long 
from  north,  south  in  which  there  was  not  the  general  admission 
that  the  men  of  the  north  had  more  energy  and  were  better 
workers  than  the  men  of  the  south.  I  found  this  true  between 
Rome  and  Sicily,  and  to  my  great  surprise  even  in  so  small  and 
good  a  country  as  England. 

What  is  the  significance  of  all  this  for  the  food  supply?  It 
means  that  the  land  of  moderate,  changeable  climate  in  the 
middle  of  the  temperate  zones,  as  shown  by  the  accompanying 
map  (see  Fig.  142),  is  the  place  where  man  will  locate  the  indus- 
tries that  require  the  most  labor;  the  place  where  most  of  the 
world's  manufacturing  will  be  done,  where  manufacturing  cities 
will  cluster  along  the  harbors,  the  rivers,  and  great  artificial 
waterways  yet  to  be  built.  Much  of  northwestern  Europe  had  al- 
ready gone  far  toward  that  condition  when  the  war  put  a  tempo- 
rary check  upon  it.  If  man  settles  down  to  industry  and  living 
rather  than  profit-making  and  war,  we  may  expect  such  regions 
to  become  almost  one  vast  suburb,  for  that  is  what  a  land  of 
garden  cities  is.  If  man  prefers  the  country  life  to  the  city 
life,  as  many  men  do,  his  country  life  may  here  as  elsewhere 
partake  of  the  suburban  character  through  the  development  of 


GETTING  MEN  TO  THE  LAND  587 

co-operation,  which  permits  farm  life  and  at  the  same  time  social 
opportunity,  as  so  graphically  described  by  Mr.  Alvin  Johnson : 

Let  us  not  think  of  the  individual  returned  soldier  exiled  to  a  tongue 
of  green  land  between  the  stony  breasts  of  western  mountains,  or 
marooned  on  a  dry  square  in  the  midst  of  the  Dismal  Swamp,  but  of 
organic  communities  of  one  or  two  hundred  farms,  with  competent 
agricultural  advisers  to  brace  up  the  technique  of  those  who  are  willing 
to  learn,  and  an  organ  of  administration  to  expel  from  the  community 
those  who  persist  in  making  an  eyesore  of  their  privilege  and  a  center 
of  demoralization  for  the  community.  In  such  a  community  the  man 
who  loves  the  soil  would  not  need  to  be  deprived  of  agreeable  social 
intercourse,  as  is  so  often  the  case  in  the  existing  agrarian  system. 
With  a  whole  community  of  men  who  are  live  and  efficient,  co-operative 
institutions  would  not  be  slow  in  developing.  This  sounds  Utopian. 
It  is  not  in  the  least  Utopian.  Such  communities  have  been  in  success- 
ful operation  in  Australia  for  years.* 

California  has  some  very  interesting  experiments  with  such  com- 
munities now  in  progress.  Such  development  of  cities  and  manu- 
facturing and  farming  means  that  there  must  be  large  raw 
material  and  food-producing  regions  in  less  stimulating  climates 
and  less  accessible  locations.  Inasmuch  as  we  have  already 
skimmed  the  cream  off  the  Great  Plains  and  prairies  of  the 
United  States,  and  are  skimming  the  cream  from  similar  plains 
in  Canada,  Argentina,  Australia,  Russia,  and  Siberia,  we  are 
naturally  looking  around  for  fresh  lands.  This  brings  the 
tropics  to  our  view. 

b.  The  Tropics  and  the  Future  Food  Supply. — Here  in  the 
frostless  realm  is  the  great  land  reserve  of  the  future,  the  land 
with  the  possibilities  of  sending  us  endless  shiploads  of  food  and 
raw  materials  for  the  garden  cities  on  the  estuaries  and  canals 
of  the  north.  It  is  a  treasure  as  yet  ail  but  untouched.  It  con- 
tains more  land  suitable  for  the  heavy  growth  of  vegetation  than 
does  all  the  rest  of  the  world. 

The  temperate  zones  are  dwarfed  into  insignificance  when  com- 
pared with  the  tropics  in  respect  to  the  possible  expansions  of 
industry  and  human  support.  Considerable  areas  of  the  tem- 
perate zone,  in  Europe,  China,  and  Japan,  have  approached  the 
food-limit,  but  unfortunately  a  great  part  of  the  remainder 

*  "  Land  for  the  Returned  Soldier,"  The  New  Republic,  September  21, 1918. 


588     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

of  the  temperate  zones  lies  under  the  withering  limitations  of 
aridity  and  of  low  temperatures.  In  contrast  to  this,  the  torrid 
zone,  which  includes  about  half  of  the  land  surface  of  the  globe, 
has  far  more  than  half  of  the  area  of  abundant  rainfall.  Add 
to  this  its  greater  heat  with  absence  of  winter,  and  we  behold 
possibilities  of  the  growth  of  food  plants  and,  therefore,  possi- 
bilities of  the  support  of  population  several  times  as  great  as 
those  of  the  temperate  zone.  These  regions  are  quite  the  equal 
of  the  winter  lands,  as  a  field  for  the  creation  of  new  resources 
by  science.  While  the  tropics  have  great  possibilities  in  the 
new  era  of  scientific  industry,  they  have  for  ages  lain  prac- 
tically unused,  and  ninety  per  'cent,  of  the  tropic  forest 
stands  virtually  as  undisturbed  as  in  the  day  of  our  arboreal 
ancestors. 

A  passage  from  United  States  Consular  Report,  December  9, 
1911,  gives  an  interesting  example  of  tropic  emptiness. 

British  North  Borneo  (area  31,000  square  miles)  is  owned  and 
governed  by  an  incorporated  company  under  a  charter  from  the  British 
Government.  The  population  of  the  colony  is  estimated  at  180,000  and 
consists  mainly  of  aborigines  with  about  15,000  Chinese  and  not  more 
than  400  Europeans. 

The  natives  clear  small  patches  of  the  valleys  and  hillsides,  where 
they  plant  rice  and  vegetables  for  food.  For  other  foodstuffs  they 
depend  upon  hunting  and  fishing.  The  manner  of  farming  is  decidedly 
primitive.  The  hoe  is  the  main  instrument,  and  there  is  no  demand 
for  agricultural  implements  or  any  kind  of  hardware  except  the  hoe, 
and  a  long  knife  used  in  war  and  in  cutting  the  underbrush.  In  all 
Borneo,  there  is  not  a  cultivated  tract  of  ground  worthy  of  being 
called  a  farm.  The  greater  part  of  the  land  is  yet  covered  with  large 
trees. 

British  North  Borneo  is  about  one-seventh  of  the  whole  island, 
which  is  as  large  as  France  and  naturally  several  times  as  pro- 
ductive because  the  unending  heat  and  moisture  of  the  equa- 
torial-belt permit  the  continuous  growth  of  crops. 

With  the  exception  of  certain  tiny  island  colonies  which  have 
become  peopled  under  the  white  man's  influence  and  a  few 
minor  exceptions  chiefly  in  southeast  Asia,  the  tropic  forest  in  its 
full  force  has  baffled  man,  and  he  has  developed  only  the  less  pro- 
ductive corners,  where  nature  goaded  him  with  difficulties,  stung 


TROPIC  FEMINE  589 

him  into  action,  made  him  work  or  starve,  and  then  often  starved 
him  despite  his  pathetic  efforts.* 

Man  is  inclined  to  take  his  ease  where  he  can,  and  it  seems  to 
require  intermittency  in  supplies  to  make  him  work.  Thus 
civilization  has,  except  under  Caucasian  influence,  advanced  in 
the  tropics  only  on  its  arid  edges  and  in  southeastern  Asia  where 
the  monsoon  rains  of  summer  make  a  season  of  growth  alter- 
nating with  the  dry  season  of  the  winter  monsoon.  Under  this 
stimulus  and  this  limitation,  India  and  south  China  alone  in 
the  tropics  have  become  populous,  and  the  occasional  failure  o£ 
the  summer  rains  produces  crop  failures  and  famines — catas- 
trophes inconceivable  to  us  of  the  well-fed  West.  It  is  a 
curious  commentary  on  man's  relations  with  tropic  nature  that 
population  should  have  become  numerous  where  the  famine 
comes  to  slay  him,  and  that  the  equatorial-belt  with  its  abundant 
and  regular  rains  should  have  remained  idle  save  for  scattered 
tribes  until  the  Dutch  showed  us  by  their  wonderful  object- 
lesson  in  Java  that  this  is  the  world's  natural  belt  of  heavy 
populations. 

Since  1798,  the  Dutch,  leaving  the  forms  of  native  govern- 
ment alone,  have  kept  peace  in  Java  and,  to  a  considerable 
extent,  directed  and  compelled  the  industry  of  the  people  to 
provide  food  for  home  use  and  export.  This  is  done  through 
a  white  "adviser"  who  tells  the  ornate  and  resplendently 
extravagant  sultan  what  to  do  in  all  matters  governmental.  If 
the  sultan  doesn't  take  advice  there  is  another  sultan  dashing 

•  FAMINE  DEATHS  IN  INDIA 
(From  William  Digby:  Prosperous  British  India,  pp.  130-131) 

1800-25 5  famines;— deaths 1,000,000 

1826-50 2  "       500,000 

1851-75 6          "  "       5,000,000 

1876-1900 18          "  "       26.000.000 

Total  since  1800 32,500,000 

These  famines  are  due  to  the  fact  that  in  this  region,  as  in  parts  of 
China,  the  monsoon  winds  with  their  summer  rains  occasionally  fail, 
bringing  complete  crop  failure.  Man  can  only  live  in  such  regions  under 
one  of  two  conditions, — occasional  famine  with  its  sweeping  loss  of  life, 
or  highly  organized  trade,  transportation,  finance,  and  relief,  like  that 
of  Belgium,  to  bring  in  food  from  the  lands  of  more  regular  climate  The 
latter  has  not  yet  taken  place,  hence  the  famines  of  India  and  China. 


590     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

about  in  bejeweled  automobiles  in  his  stead.  As  a  result  there 
has  been  peace,  and  the  population  has  increased  more  than 
five-fold  in  a  little  more  than  a  century.  In  Java  and  Madura 
(the  population  is  mostly  in  Java)  there  are  fifty  thousand 
square  miles  with  thirty-six  million  people,  over  seven  hundred 
to  the  square  mile  on  the  average,  and  it  is  far  from  being  fully 
populated.  Only  forty  per  cent,  of  the  land  is  under  culti- 
vation. There  are  many  wild  forest  districts,  in  which  the 
elephant  and  rhinoceros  roam  at  large;  and  a  recent  European 
scientist  has  (for  good  reasons,  I  believe)  estimated  that  Java 
may  easily  support  three  times  as  many  people  as  it  now  pos- 
sesses. This  would  bring  its  density  up  to  over  two  thousand 
per  square  mile.  By  applying  this  figure  to  the  whole  Dutch 
East  Indies,  of  which  Java  and  Madura  are  a  sample  compris- 
ing less  than  one-fourteenth,  we  would  have  a  population  as  large 
as  that  of  Europe,  and  nearly  four  times  as  great  as  that  of 
North  America.  The  significant  thing  about  Java  for  the 
world's  food  supply  is  the  fact  that  these  people  are  able  to 
export  to  the  West  hundreds  of  thousands  of  tons  each  year  of 
sugar,  along  with  large  quantities  of  tobacco,  coffee,  tea,  rice, 
indigo,  copra,  cinchona  (quinine),  rubber,  and  other  tropical 
products.  Population  of  such  density  over  the  suitable  parts 
of  the  tropics  would  permit  that  zone  alone  to  contain  six  or 
eight  times  as  many  people  as  the  entire  world  now  contains, 
and  they  would  be  far  less  liable  to  famine  than  are  those  in 
India  today.  If  they  followed  the  example  of  Java,  they  would 
also  have  enormous  quantities  of  food  and  raw  materials  to 
export  to  manufacturing  lands. 

Evidence  of  the  correctness  of  the  high  estimate  of  possible 
population  for  Java  and  for  other  tropic  localities  is  found  in 
the  fact  that  Barbados,  in  the  Lesser  Antilles,  has  1,170  people 
per  square  mile ;  that  Porto  Rico  has  over  300  people  per  square 
mile,  supporting  themselves  by  a  primitive  agriculture  in  hilly 
country  that  is  still  far  from  being  fully  populated ;  that  Cuba, 
the  size  of  Virginia,  with  but  three  per  cent,  of  the  land  under 
cultivation  maintains  a  population  of  two  and  one-quarter  mil- 
lion people — forty-seven  to  the  square  mile.  Cuba  has  over  two 
persons  to  the  cultivated  acre  and  the  methods  of  culture  are 
very  unscientific.  There  is  nothing  exceptional  about  Barbados 


TROPIC  FOOD  591 

or  Porto  Rico  or  Cuba,  except  that  by  the  accidents  of  location 
and  history  they  are  more  used  than  the  rest  of  tropic  America. 
If  Brazil  were  as  populous  as  Porto  Rico,  its  population  would 
exceed  that  of  the  four  continents  touching  the  Atlantic,  and 
there  is  every  reason  to  think  that  Brazil  could  easily  support 
that  number  of  people  if  they  chose  to  dispossess  the  monkeys, 
the  parrots,  the  serpents,  and  the  other  wild  life  that  is  now 
in  undisturbed  possession  of  hundreds  of  thousands  of  square 
miles  of  forest  in  the  earth's  most  productive  belt.  The  whole 
of  Brazil  and  the  rest  of  tropical  South  America  have  a  popu- 
lation less  than  that  of  the  little  island  of  Java.  This  part  of 
South  America  possesses,  as  do  similar  latitudes  in  Africa,  large 
areas  of  absolutely  unexplored  territory.  It  is,  therefore,  per- 
fectly natural  that  the  few  commercial  products  of  the  equa- 
torial-belt, except  those  from  Java,  should  still  be  the  wild 
products  of  the  forest,  namely,  rubber  and  gums,  palm  oil  and 
ivory,  with  a  little  cocoa,  which  grows  in  orchards  little  better 
than  a  modified  jungle.  The  jungle  is  an  almost  untouched 
resource  teeming  with  possibilities  of  crops  and  food.  In  connec- 
tion with  the  tropics,  it  is  significant  to  recall  that  this  region  is 
the  seat  of  production  of  the  banana,  our  cheapest  ready-to-use 
starch  food,  and  has  many  rival  claimants  for  the  title,  among 
them  the  sweet  potato,  cassava,  and  dasheen ;  the  peanut,  one  of 
the  cheapest  proteins ;  coconut,  one  of  the  cheapest  sources  of  fat, 
with  many  rivals ;  cane  sugar,  the  cheapest  carbohydrate ;  rubber, 
indispensable  to  our  cheapest  form  of  highway  transport. 

THE   INHABITANTS   OF  THE   TROPICS 

If  the  tropic  jungle  becomes  a  field,  who  will  labor  in  it?  If 
three  centuries  of  colonization  have  shown  us  anything  they 
have  shown  that  it  will  not  be  the  white  man.  The  white  man 
has  settled  all  these  tropic  shores — the  Spanish  Main,  the  Indies 
East  and  West,  Africa,  South  America,  and  Asia.  He  settled 
them  before  the  United  States  was  settled  and  he  has  settled  them 
since.  He  has  repeatedly  settled  them  and  the  settlements  have 
always  melted  away.  The  white  man  is  a  product  of  the  tem- 
perate zone.  Caucasians  do  not  like  heat.  They  fly  from  it  as 
it  shows  itself  in  the  summer  of  Washington,  New  York,  Boston, 


592       THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

and  London,  and  the  unending  heat  of  the  tropic  lowland  is 
one  of  the  persistent  forces  of  nature  that  the  Caucasians  have 
been  unable  to  withstand.  In  three  centuries  of  trial  on  every 
tropic  shore,  there  has  been  no  single  case  of  a  group  of  Euro- 
peans who  have  physically  thriven,  or  increased  from  generation 
to  generation,  or  maintained  the  culture  of  the  founders.  It  is 
instructive  to  analyze  the  population  of  Jamaica  after  three  cen- 
turies of  repeated  colonization  by  strange  races  from  Europe, 
Africa,  and  Asia — from  the  temperate  and  from  the  tropic  lands. 
That  island  has  had  the  incomparable  advantages  of  250  years  of 
British  rule  and  a  large  amount  of  mountain  with  its  cooler 
climate.  Adjustment  of  all  these  forces  has  produced  a  popu- 
lation of  nearly  200  per  square  mile,  2.3  per  cent,  white,  76 
per  cent,  negro,  19  per  cent.  " colored,"  1.8  per  cent.  East 
Indian.  Within  twenty  years  the  increase  of  the  colored  races 
has  been  over  200,000 ;  the  white  population  is  now  about  15,000. 
Such  races  as  the  Malays,  the  Negroes,  the  Hindoos,  and  the 
south  Chinese,  have  through  many  generations  become  better 
adjusted  to  this  climate  of  which  they  are  a  product  than  have 
the  whites.  They  can  live  and  work  and  increase  on  the  tropic 
lowland — witness  Java  and  Jamaica.  The  white  man  can  only 
come  in  as  the  ruler,  the  capitalist,  the  plantation  manager,  the 
engineer,  the  sanitarian,  the  expert,  and  the  professional  man, 
but  in  these  capacities  he  can  make  the  framework  and  uphold 
the  structure  of  tropical  society — industrially,  commercially,  and 
politically. 

The  distribution  of  population  in  tropic  America  affords  an 
excellent  illustration  of  the  influence  of  climate  on  the  white 
man  and  on  the  location  of  his  home.  These  countries  are  all 
under  the  dominance  of  the  Spanish  and  Portuguese,  races  which 
are  supposed  to  be  more  resistant  to  tropic  conditions  than  are 
other  white  races.  Yet  in  all  tropic  America,  with  the  single 
exception  of  Rio  de  Janeiro,  these  races  have  placed  their  capital 
city  inland  on  the  plateau  to  get  away  from  the  tropic  low  plain. 
This  was  done,  too,  with  great  effort,  as  shown  by  the  labors  inci- 
dent to  carrying  on  trade  in  the  pre-railroad  epoch  between  the 
port  and  the  capital  hundreds  or  thousands  of  feet  above  and 
many  miles  inland.  Thus  the  capital  cities  of  Ecuador  and 
Colombia  at  or  near  the  equator  are  more  than  three  hundred 


UNUSED  TROPIC  LANDS  593 

miles  from  the  sea  and  nearly  two  miles  in  elevation,  with  all  the 
hardships  of  travel  and  agriculture  that  that  elevation  involves 
— but  with  the  compensation  of  a  cool  climate.  Even  Costa  Rica 
has  its  capital  at  an  elevation  of  nearly  a  mile.  The  only  excep- 
tion to  the  plateau  location  of  tropic  Latin-America  capitals  is 
Bio  de  Janeiro,  a  city  upon  the  edge  of  the  tropics,  with  a  plateau 
immediately  in  the  rear,  and  on  the  plateau  a  suburb  containing 
the  residences  of  the  dominant  whites  and  the  foreign  colony. 
The  significance  of  the  locations  of  these  cities  becomes  clear 
when  one  notes  that  the  location  of  every  capital  in  north  Europe 
is  either  a  seaport  or  is  so  low  in  elevation  as  to  be  reached  by 
efficient  water  transportation. 

Despite  this  retreat  of  the  white  races  of  tropic  America  to 
the  cool  interior  they  have  always  remained  a  small,  very  small 
minority.  The  native  Indian  makes  up  the  bulk  of  the  popu- 
lation, and  the  half-breeds  the  second  element  in  numerical  im- 
portance. But  the  handful  of  white  people  rules — a  fact  not 
without  significance. 

If  these  vacant  tropic  plains  which  we  claim,  but  may  not 
inhabit,  are  to  become  peopled,  apparently  the  population  must 
consist  of  the  various  black,  brown,  or  yellow  races  that  have 
become  somewhat  adjusted  to  the  tropic  climate.  Left  to  their 
own  desires,  these  men  have  formed  small  tribes  with  sul- 
tans, wars,  murders,  piracies,  slavery,  and  pestilences  that 
effectively  kept  down  population.  They  have  never  yet  devel- 
oped even  a  second-rate  power  or  civilization  and  have  fallen 
an  easy  prey  to  colonizing  European  powers.  Given  order  and 
protection  and  guidance  as  in  Java,  they  clear  up  the  jungle, 
populate  the  earth,  and  have  crops  to  sell.  By  the  aid  of  the 
acclimated  peoples  and  apparently  thus  only  will  these  un- 
touched continents  yield  unlimited  amounts  of  rice  and  rubber, 
sugar,  cocoa,  oil  and  nuts,  cotton,  hemp,  and  other  fibers,  and 
a  whole  host  of  tropical  products  which  we  can  buy  with  our 
northern  goods,  especially  with  the  products  of  factories  located 
in  comfortable  and  stimulating  climates. 

c.  Relation  of  Tropic  Peoples  to  Northern  Prosperity.— The 
growth  of  the  dense  populations  of  the  Barbados,  Porto  Rico, 
Java,  and  Bengal  shows  that  these  lands  are  almost  certain  to 
remain  essentially  agricultural  or,  at  best,  at  a  low  stage  of 


594     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

manufacturing.  The  tropic  lack  of  ambition  indicates  that  these 
countries  will  probably  remain  indefinitely  as  colonies  or  manda- 
tories, negligible  as  political  powers.  The  white  races  of  America 
and  Europe  would  have  nothing  to  fear  from  three  or  five  or  ten 
billions  of  black,  brown,  or  yellow  people  in  the  torrid  zone. 
They  would  be  non-militant  agriculturists,  carrying  out,  as  now, 
the  instructions  of  white  men,*  and  our  trade  with  them,  largely 
the  exchange  of  manufactures  for  raw  materials,  would  be  a  great 
source  of  riches  for  the  temperate  zone,  and  would  easily  enable 
northern  lands  to  double  or  treble  their  population.  The  sooner 
we  recognize  and  act  on  the  fact  that  we  have  a  brown  man's 
world  and  as  distinct  from  the  white  man's  world,  the  more 
comfortable  we  shall  all  be. 

Modern  science,  with  its  development  of  mechanics  and  sani- 
tation, makes  this  development  of  the  tropics  much  easier  than 
it  has  ever  been  in  the  past.  Within  twenty  years  we  have 
learned  that  many  of  the  dreaded  tropic  diseases  such  as  the 
yellow  fever,  the  even  more  dreadful  malaria,  the  sleeping  sick- 
ness of  Africa,  and  many  others,  are  due  to  the  action  of  specific 
germs  in  our  blood,  put  there  by  insects  whose  habits  we  now 
know.  We  have  at  last  located  our  enemy,  and,  as  a  result  of 
these  discoveries,  yellow  fever,  which  for  ages  was  the  scourge 
of  the  tropics  and  has  occasionally  invaded  the  temperate  zone 
in  the  summer  season,  has  now  virtually  disappeared.  With  the 
advance  of  protective  medicine  and  sanitary  science,  there  is  no 
reason  why  the  tropic  death-rate  should  not  be  greatly  reduced, 
provided  white  men  can  govern.  The  real  crux  is  the  main- 
tenance of  the  white  man. 

Now  that  the  airplane  has  given  us  unprecedented  speed  of 
transportation  and  an  entire  independence  of  the  earthly  road, 
so  hard  to  make  and  keep  in  repair,  it  is  possible  for  twenty 
supervising  white  men  to  get  into  their  plane  on  the  slopes  of 
Chimborazo  and  in  an  hour  sail  down  nine  thousand  feet  and 
one  hundred  miles  to  the  coconut  or  rubber  or  sugar  plantations 

*  The  alternative  is  that  in  most  cases  they  obey  the  local  tyrant  of 
their  own  color.  This  contrast  is  admirably  drawn  by  comparing  the  two 
West  Indian  Islands  of  Jamaica  and  Hayti  during  the  last  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  Both  had  a  population  chiefly  composed  of  emanci- 
pated negroes.  One  had  British  rule,  the  other  was  independent.  The 
one  had  order  and  fair  justice.  The  other  was  in  almost  continual  civil 
war,  with  all  that  it  implies. 


CAN  WE  LIVE  IN  THE  TROPICS?  595 

of  the  hot  plains  of  Ecuador,  do  their  day's  work,  and  in  the 
evening,  to  the  roaring  sound  of  the  airplane,  soar  home  to  their 
wives  and  children  on  the  cool  slopes  of  the  Andes.  An  enormous 
area  of  uninhabited  tropic  low  plain  is  within  this  one  hundred 
mile  distance  of  some  cool  and  reasonable  healthy  volcanic  peak, 
mountain  range,  or  wide  plateau. 

Another  possibility,  even  more  suggestive,  is  that  of  building 
of  a  many  compartment  house,  a  veritable  village,  or  town  under 
one  roof,  in  which  the  process  by  which  man  has  entered  the 
land  of  frost  and  snow  shall  be  reversed — cooling  the  air  of 
his  dwelling  instead  of  heating  it.  Most  of  the  troubles  of  the 
tropics  arise  from  the  atmospheric  conditions  of  heat,  humidity, 
and  constancy  of  temperature.  We  now  know  how  to  control 
heat,  humidity,  and  temperature.  We  know  how  to  build  a 
city  under  one  roof  and  with  mechanical  power  make  the  tem- 
perature exactly  the  temperature  that  man  needs,  and  make  the 
humidity  just  the  humidity  that  man  needs,  so  that  there  is 
perhaps  no  reason  why  he  might  not  live  and  raise  children  in 
the  tropics  almost  as  well  as  in  England,  France,  or  the  United 
States.  He  would  go  out  of  doors  into  the  hot  sunshine  just 
as  in  northern  countries  we  go  out  of  doors  in  winter  when  the 
weather  is  cold;  but  the  tropic  community-dwelling  would  have 
wholesome  atmospheric  conditions  instead  of  the  unwholesome 
conditions  which  now  so  commonly  prevail  in  the  cold  lands 
because  of  the  extreme  aridity  of  the  air  in  a  heated  house  in  a 
northern  winter.* 

d.  The  Soundness  and  Richness  of  Tropic  Agriculture. — If  we 
do  undertake  seriously  the  development  of  the  tropics  as  a  source 
of  food  supply,  both  for  the  natives  and  for  ourselves,  we  shall 
find  an  interesting  agriculture  of  three  types,  each  of  which 
exceeds  in  permanency  the  type  prevailing  in  the  temperate 
zone. 

1.  Irrigation.  So  much  of  the  tropics  has  heavy  rainfall  that 
most  of  the  agriculture  of  the  present  depends,  as  previously 
stated  (see  chapters  on  sugar  and  rice),  on  irrigation,  which  may 
be  extended  in  the  torrid  zone  until  it  covers  an  area  many  times 
that  possible  in  the  temperate  zone.  These  are  the  lands  for 

*  Review  of  Reviews,  September,  1918.  Two  very  valuable  articles  for 
every  user  of  a  heated  room. 


596     THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

sugar,  rice,  corn,  and  starch  roots,  such  as  cassava,  sweet  potato, 
yam,  taro,  and  others. 

2.  Tree  Crops.  If  tree  crops  offer  great  possibilities  for  the 
temperate  zone,  they  have  even  greater  possibilities  in  the  tropics. 
In  fact,  tropic  agriculture  is  to  a  surprising  extent  already  an 
agriculture  of  tree  crops,  as  a  brief  review  of  the  origin  of  tropic 
exports  will  show.  Trees  produce  coffee,  tea,  most  of  the  spices, 
and  cinchona.  Trees  give  us  cocoa,  coconut,  the  palm  nuts  in 
several  varieties,  the  Brazil  nuts.  This  group  as  a  source  of  fats 
has  great  present  importance,  rapidly  increasing  importance,  and 
enormous  possibilities.  From  the  sago  palm  the  native  makes 
sago,  a  staple  starch,  and  from  the  sugar  palm  in  some  parts  of 
the  tropics  he  also  makes  sugar.  From  trees  also  come  that 
invaluable  raw  material,  rubber,  just  now  in  process  of  trans- 
formation from  a  wild  to  a  plantation  product.  Also  from  trees 
come  gutta  percha  and  gutta  joolatong,  of  which  Java  now  sends 
us  five  thousand  tons  which  we  eventually  misuse  as  chewing 
gum. 

Other  tropic  trees  give  us  the  banana,  the  orange,  and  the 
avocado,  a  wonderful  fruit  produced  in  large  quantities  and 
rivaling  the  olive  as  a  source  of  edible  fat  (see  chapter  on 
Edible  Fats),  of  which  it  contains  twenty  to  thirty  per  cent. 
The  number  of  tropic  trees  yielding  fruits  is  quite  unknown,  and 
their  undeveloped  state  is  well  exemplified  by  the  mango,  a  tree 
widely  grown  in  India,  the  West  Indies,  and  many  other  tropic 
countries.  At  the  present  time  the  growers  do  not  graft  the 
trees,  but  merely  raise  them  from  seed,  which  gives  trees  of 
much  lower  productivity.  The  common  practice  is  to  let  the 
trees  grow  where  they  come  up.  The  fruit  goes  to  tropic  city 
markets,  but  it  is  shaken  off  and  bruised  so  that  it  will  keep 
only  a  short  time.  Yet  good  varieties  can  be  grafted  and  will 
stand  shipment  from  the  West  Indies  to  the  United  States. 
The  possibility  of  using  new  fruits  is  well  shown  by  the  im- 
portation before  the  war  of  pineapples  from  equatorial  Africa 
to  Germany  packed  in  peat  dust. 

Thus  the  tropic  lowlands  can  be  irrigated  and  the  tropic  hill- 
sides planted  with  tree  crops. 

3.  Also  soil  saving  and  non-erosive  is  the  native  type  of  plow- 
less  agriculture  common  in  many  parts  of  the  tropics.  (See  Fig. 


SOIL-SAVING  AGRICULTURE  597 

34.)  These  three  types  of  tropic  agriculture,  none  of  which 
carries  with  it  the  soil  destruction  so  common  in  the  plow  agri- 
culture of  the  temperate  zone,  serve  to  show  that  perhaps  we 


Fio.  144. — Panama  Indian  fanner's  family,  home,  and  all  the  tools  of 
agriculture — a  machete  (in  man's  right  hand)  to  cut  the  bushes  and 
weeds  and  a  sharp  stick  to  make  holes  for  seeds.  These  people  are  from 
another  world,  the  tropic  world.  They  have  not  developed  from  savagery 
through  the  pastoral  or  animal-tending  state.  That  is  the  Aryan  method. 
These  tropic  people  seem  never  to  have  used  animals  to  any  important 
extent  but  developed  at  once  a  hand  agriculture  depending  largely  on 
starchy  roots,  sweet  potato,  yam,  manioc,  taro,  caladium,  and  others  which 
have  been  tilled  so  long  that  they  have  lost  the  power  of  producing  seed. 
The  banana,  corn,  and  sugar  cane  are  important  additions  to  this  untilled 
soil-preserving  agriculture  which  has,  with  the  jungle,  alternately  occu- 
pied parts  of  tropic  America  for  a  length  of  time  that  no  man  knows. 
(Photo  H.  H.  Bennett,  United  States  Bureau  of  Soils.) 

can  depend  upon  the  tropics  after  we  have  destroyed  our  own 
lands,  for  at  the  present  time  we  and  not  the  tropic  farmers  are 
the  agricultural  barbarians  of  the  world,  if  destruction  be  re 
garded  as  the  test  of  barbarism. 

Certainly  the  examination  of  the  unused  resources  of  the  tern- 


598      THE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  FOOD  AND  OF  MEN 

peratc  zone  and  of  the  unused  resources  of  the  tropics  in  the  light 
of  known  science  and  its  reasonable  applications,  shows  that  the 
present  food  supply  of  the  world  may  be  increased  many  fold 
without  increasing  the  number  of  hours  per  day  that  man  must 
work,  or  in  any  way  reducing  his  physical  well-being;  indeed 
permitting  him  to  increase  his  social  welfare.  The  time  has  come 
for  us  to  use  constructively  the  powers  that  lie  in  our  hands. 
If  we  will  do  so,  famine,  for  many  generations  at  least,  may  be 
put  in  the  same  class  with  witchcraft,  and,  let  us  hope,  war — 
three  agencies  that  have  equally  good  reason  for  entering  seri- 
ously into  our  lives. 

REFERENCES 

Rowntree,  B.  S. :  Land  and  Labor  in  Belgium.     The  Macmillan  Co. 

See  list  of  publications  by  the  Division  of  Foreign  Seed  and  Plant 
Introduction,  U.  S.  Dept.  Agr. 

King,  F.  H.:  Farmers  of  Forty  Centuries.  Madison,  Wis.,  1912. 
An  excellent  account  of  oriental  agriculture  by  an  expert. 

Control  of  the  Tropics,  by  Benjamin  Kidd. 


CHAPTER  XXVIII 
HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR 

WORLD   CONQUEST   OR   WORLD  GOVERNMENT 

THE  world  as  pictured  in  this  book,  a  world  of  almost  countless 
comfortable  millions  of  men  with  plenty  of  food,  developing 
trade,  education,  the  arts,  and  the  great  art  of  living,  can  only  be- 
come real  if  we  can  banish  from  it  permanently  several  conspicu- 
ous characters  of  history — Captain  Kidd,  Alexander,  Caesar, 
Tamerlane,  William  Hohenzollern.  Those  accursed  twins,  the 
conqueror  and  the  pirate,  the  one  using  government  as  a  sham, 
the  other  boldly  flouting  it,  are  the  arch  enemies  of  world  peace. 
They  are  the  enemies  of  the  comfortable  world  herein  described, 
for  that  world  requires  peace  and  the  unrestricted  use  of  the  sea. 
If  the  food  supply  is  ever  fully  developed,  the  lives  of  thousands 
of  millions  of  people  will  depend  on  the  continuance  of  sea  trade ; 
that  is,  they  will  depend  on  the  mercy  of  any  power  that  controls 
the  sea.  The  sudden  increase  of  population  in  the  past  century, 
from  six  to  sixteen  hundred  millions,  has  been  largely  due  to 
sea  trade,  which  could  become  important  only  with  the  disap- 
pearance of  the  pirate,  and  the  assurance  of  safety.  For  ages, 
down  to  one  hundred  and  fifteen  years  ago,  the  black  flag  of 
the  pirate  was  the  dread  of  the  men  who  went  down  to  the  sea 
in  ships.  Even  at  the  time  of  the  establishment  of  the  govern- 
ment of  the  United  States,  the  man  who  took  an  ocean  journey 
put  his  earthly  affairs  in  order  and  bade  his  friends  a  solemn 
farewell,  for  good  and  sufficient  reasons.  In  that  day  trade  was 
a  luxury;  the  world's  population,  much  smaller  than  it  is  now, 
was  kept  down  in  large  part  by  the  pirate,  who  made  trade 
almost  impossible.  The  last  century  has  seen  the  conquest  of 
mechanical  power  and  the  conquest  of  the  pirate. 

History  seems  to  indicate  that  man  is  by  nature  a  marauder, 
a  conqueror.  The  history  of  the  race  is  a  sad  chronicle  of  almost 
unending  marauding  conquest.  Why  did  the  prehistoric  Swiss 

699 


600  HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR 

have  lake  dwellings,  and  the  prehistoric  Spaniards  live  in  caves, 
and  why  was  Eome  built  on  seven  hills?  What  befell  Babylon, 
Nineveh,  Carthage,  the  Aztecs,  and  Louvain?  There  is  but  one 
answer — conquest.  Family  has  fought  family,  clan  has  fought 
clan,  tribe  has  fought  tribe,  people  has  fought  people,  until  the 
number  of  such  episodes  must  certainly  run  to  seven  figures  if 
not  indeed  to  seventeen.  Civilizations  for  the  last  seven  thou- 
sand years  have  risen  and  then  fallen  under  the  smashing  blow 
of  some  vigorous  band  of  rovers.  How  long  this  state  of  affairs 
went  on  in  the  prehistoric  past  no  man  can  even  guess,  but  it  was 
certainly  tens  of  thousands  of  years.  Organized  society  arises  in 
spots  that  can  be  protected  and  survives  for  a  time,  until  attack 
from  without  overcomes  defense  from  within.  America  was  pos- 
sessed by  one  roving  band  after  another,  except  for  the  almost 
inaccessible  and  arid  plateaus  of  the  southwest,  where  cliff 
dwellers,  growing  a  meager  food  supply  in  some  narrow  irrigated 
valley,  climbed  up  a  train  or  ladder  to  some  perilous  height  and 
there  protected  themselves  while  they  developed  the  most  ad- 
vanced civilization  in  America.  Of  the  great  civilizations  now 
extant,  only  China  has  had  a  long  history ;  she  has  survived  be- 
cause nature  placed  her  in  a  situation  with  almost  marvelous 
natural  protection,*  where  the  people  had  so  little  need  for 
defensive  war  that  they  could  develop  pacifist  principles  to  a 
high  degree  and  make  them  not  only  an  ideal  but  a  practice — the 
fortunate  result  of  a  favorable  location.  For  a  time,  the  people 
of  America  dreamed  of  a  second  China,  based  on  the  principles 
set  forth  in  Washington's  farewell  address,  but  suddenly  the 
machinery  of  modern  science  once  more  strengthened  the  hand  of 
conquest. 

As  the  42-centimeter  gun  and  the  march  toward  Calais  put 
an  end  to  England's  insular  isolation,  so  the  submarine  showed 
America  that  she,  too,  must  fight  or  submit. 

Pacificism  is  no  longer  a  workable  principle.  The  whole 
world  must  defend  itself  or  take  the  mercy  of  the  conqueror, 
which  history  shows  to  be  a  scanty  mercy,  alike  in  Carthage, 
Rome,  and  Belgium.  Even  China  has  changed.  Pacifist  for 
forty  centuries,  she  now  has  a  military  academy  and  drills  her 

*  See  J.  Russell  Smith,  Industrial  and  Commercial  Geography,  Chapter 
XVI,  Part  II. 


THE  WORLD  IS  UNIFIED  601 

sons  in  Western  war  tactics  because  the  steamships  and  the  rail- 
roads of  the  Western  peoples  have  shown  her  that  her  isolation 
is  no  more,  and  that  the  conquerors  are  at  her  doors,  each  taking 
a  slice  of  her  territory.  She  knows  that  now  she  must  defend 
herself.  More  suddenly,  but  even  more  completely,  has  the 
United  States  changed  her  attitude,  upon  the  appearance  of  the 
submarine,  a  mechanism  of  conquest,  in  the  hands  of  a  people 
ambitious  to  dominate  the  earth  after  the  manner  of  Alexander 
and  Caesar. 

The  world  is  one.  It  is  one  in  trade ;  it  must  also  become  one 
in  government.  The  most  serious  question  at  present  facing  the 
human  race  is  this:  whose  government  shall  it  be?  Shall  we 
have  world  empire,  world  dominance,  world  obedience,  world 
tribute,  world  submission,  or  shall  we  have  a  democracy  of 
peoples,  each  free  to  develop  its  bit  of  the  earth,  to  perfect  its 
own  way  of  living,  to  trade  with  its  neighbors,  to  live  as  do  the 
citizens  of  any  well-ordered  community — tending  their  gardens 
training  their  children,  buying  and  selling,  coming  and  going 
among  their  fellows,  obedient  to  no  one  and  to  no  class,  but 
obedient  to  the  concerted  will  of  all?  World  empire  with  its 
attendant  slavery  could  be  more  easily  achieved  today  with  our 
modern  machinery  than  was  the  Roman  Empire,  with  its  enslave- 
ment of  all  the  rest  of  the  world  that  was  known  and  was  con- 
sidered worth  the  taking. 

Of  course  we  want  world  democracy,  but  the  recent  war  has 
shown  us  that  the  utilization  of  the  earth  requires  both  the  con- 
trol of  nature  and,  to  some  extent  at  least,  the  control  of  humai? 
nature  so  that  nations  may  have  equality  of  opportunity. 

WORLD   THINKING   AND   THE  DEVELOPMENT   OP  GOVERNMENT 

We  must  use  enough  geographic  imagination  to  think  in  terms 
of  the  whole  world.  We  have  developed  world  trade,  world 
investment,  world  enterprise.  But  enterprise  must  not  be 
allowed  to  run  loose  and  uncontrolled  because  its  possibilities 
are  bigger  than  man's  habits  of  thought.  We  have  been  trying 
to  run  twentieth  century  business  on  seventeenth  century  prin- 
ciples. The  concepts,  the  mental  equipment  of  most  of  us,  the 
mental  habits  of  most  of  us  are  of  an  age  long  past.  The  most 

LIBRARY 

STATT  JFAC>  ER  S  C    L    '"£ 
SA..TA 


602  HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR 

dangerous  vermiform  appendix  in  man  is  not  in  his  stomach,  but 
in  his  brain  cavity,  with  painful  results  to  human  society.  We 
can  make  a  scientific  machine  in  five  years  and  put  it  to  work, 
but  it  is  a  slow  job  to  readjust  society  to  it.  We  must  continue 
to  suffer  unless  we  develop  world  thinking  and  develop  world 
government,  to  protect  society  and  to  control  the  world  enterprise 
in  which  individuals  have  engaged  for  individual  profit. 

After  all,  world  government  is  no  new  idea,  but  merely  one 
further  step  in  an  old  process,  a  process  of  regional  consolidation 
that  accompanies  increased  ease  of  transportation  and  communi- 
cation. There  was  a  time  when  the  family  was  the  largest  unit 
of  government.  Then  a  small  group  of  families  banded  to- 
gether ;  then  these  were  included  in  a  tribe,  until  finally  nations 
were  formed — they  have  risen  and  fallen  for  millenniums,  getting 
ever  larger  and  larger  until  now  we  are  faced  by  the  very  prac- 
tical demand  for  a  world  nation,  which,  after  all,  is  but  one  more 
step  in  the  age-old  process  of  regional  consolidation.  A  recent 
traveler  tells  us  of  a  hamlet  of  twelve  houses  in  the  Himalayas 
so  far  removed  from  neighbors,  trade  routes,  and  means  of  access 
that  they  were  absolutely  independent  of  all  mankind — a  little 
world  in  themselves.  A  little  more  than  one  thousand  years  ago 
England  comprised  seven  independent  kingdoms,  and  Wales  and 
Scotland  were  occupied  by  a  number  of  independent  rival  war- 
ring clans.  Fiance  has  had  a  similar  history.  Within  the 
memory  of  men  still  living,  Italy  was  composed  of  a  half-dozen 
independent  governments.  Germany  was  held  by  scores,  some 
say  three  hundred,  independent  states  a  few  centuries  ago,  and 
twenty-seven  states  as  late  as  1870.  In  1787  the  United  States 
was  virtually  thirteen  independent  commonwealths,  and  the 
physical  and  intellectual  task  of  making  those  thirteen  govern- 
ments function  as  one  government  involved  the  overcoming  of 
greater  natural  difficulties  than  does  the  task  of  making  the 
United  States  of  the  World  out  of  the  ten  leading  powers.  For 
it  took  the  men  of  the  thirteen  states  of  1789  far  longer  to  com- 
municate with  one  another.  It  took  them  longer  to  exchange 
their  products.  The  freight  rate,  i.e.,  the  relative  cost  of  ex- 
change, was  higher  and  the  basis  of  trade  and  economic  unity 
was  less  stable.  Just  as  our  ancestors,  driven  by  the  menace  of 
disintegration,  made  one  nation  out  of  the  thirteen  in  1789,  so 


THE  RIGHTS  OF  PEOPLE  603 

must  this  generation  make  one  power  out  of  the  leading  powers 
of  the  world.  Just  as  the  thirteen  states  relinquished  the  oppor- 
tunity to  exploit  one  another  by  war,  tariff,  trade,  and  financial 
disagreement,  so  the  nations  of  the  world,  if  they  would  keep 
the  peace,  must  stop  the  exploitation  of  one  regional  group  of 
people  by  another. 

SOME   CONDITIONS  OF  WORLD  GOVERNMENT 

To  make  this  world  organization  survive,  several  conditions  are 
necessary :  first,  all  must  have  access  to  the  sea.  There  must  be 
no  more  question  about  the  right  of  a  people  to  have  free  access 
to  the  sea  than  there  is  about  the  right  of  man  to  have  free 
access  to  the  public  road  or  street.  It  may  cost  the  farmer  some- 
thing to  make  a  lane  out  to  the  road,  but,  by  right  of  law  and 
eminent  domain,  he  may  make  it  and  pay  for  it  whether  his 
neighbor  will  or  no.  So  the  men  of  Switzerland  and  Serbia 
Poland,  Slavonia  and  all  other  peoples  must  have  as  unques- 
tioned right  of  commercial  access  to  the  sea  as  have  the  people 
of  Ohio  or  Kentucky. 

The  sea  also  must  be  free,  as  it  normally  is,  in  times  of  peace. 
Therefore  the  real  task  is  to  create  a  world  organization  that 
will  last,  one  that  will  not  have  in  it  the  germs  of  war  which 
may  break  out  at  some  future  time  and  close  the  sea.  Organizing 
such  a  League  of  Peace  will  be  a  hard  task.  Aggressive  war  arises 
from  two  great  desires:  one,  the  lust  of  dominion,  which  makes 
people  wish  to  rule  others  for  the  mere  satisfaction  of  exercising 
power,  the  desire  that  made  Roman  emperors  have  captive  kings 
walk  behind  them,  the  desire  which  is  said  to  have  made 
ex-Kaiser  Wilhelm  wish  to  ride  down  Unter  den  Linden  carrying 
the  keys  of  conquered  cities. 

Desire  for  land  is  the  other  great  cause  of  war,  and  it  is  a 
greater  menace  to  world  peace  than  is  the  lust  of  dominion. 
Nearly  everybody  wishes  to  own  some  land.  We  also  like  to  make 
our  living  as  easily  as  possible.  If  a  nation  has  much  good  land 
for  each  man,  living  is  easy;  if  it  has  little  land  for  each  man, 
living  is  hard.  The  great  advantage  of  the  United  States  is  that 
it  is  a  country  with  plenty  of  room,  where  living  has  therefore 
been  easy,  where  good  food  has  been  abundant,  and  where  man 


604  HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR 

can  live  well  with  less  work  than  in  any  other  country  in  the 
world.  For  these  reasons  immigrants  have  come  to  us.  This 
abundance  of  land  and  consequently  of  food  is  the  most  con- 
spicuous single  characteristic  of  the  American  continent  as  con- 
trasted with  Europe  or  Asia.  Its  effect  is  shown  in  the  con- 
ditions of  living  in  that  large  part  of  the  country  south  of  Penn- 
sylvania and  the  Ohio  and  Missouri  rivers  and  west  to  the  limit 
of  the  Eastern  forest  area.  This  whole  region  was  originally 
forest  covered,  and  more  than  half  of  it  is  yet  covered  by  some 
kind  of  forest  growth.  It  is  spoken  of  now,  and  rightly,  as  a 
place  where  the  returned  soldier  may  find  land  for  a  farm  and 
home.  -Logs  and  timber  are  still  abundant  for  the  building  of 
houses,  which  can  be  of  cheap  construction  because  the  winter 
is  milder  than  that  of  the  north.  The  same  mild  climate  makes 
little  fuel  necessary,  and  this  fuel  the  abundant  woods  still 
furnish. 

Natural  conditions  supply  cheap  houses  and  cheap  fuel;  and 
custom  permits  cheap  clothing.  A  large  part  of  the  expendi- 
ture of  city  people  for  clothes  is  for  style  rather  than  for  pro- 
tection; the  inexpensive  cotton  suit  is  almost  as  durable  as  a 
woolen  suit  costing  several  times  as  much. 

FREE  FOOD  IN  SOUTHERN  STATES  AND  ITS  INFLUENCE  ON 
MANUFACTURE  AND  WORLD  POLITICS 

Food  is  the  most  important  of  the  free  goods  of  abundant 
lands,  and  the  most  helpful  to  cheap  living.  From  the  Rio 
Grande  to  Delaware  Bay  the  first  bright  days  of  spring  bring 
a  run  of  fish  upward  from  the  sea  in  thousands  of  creeks 
and  rivers,  and  in  these  regions  a  family  can  be  as  sure  of 
getting  fish  by  sitting  on  the  stream  bank  and  catching  them  as 
can  the  family  that  sends  to  a  city  market  and  pays  money  for 
them.  The  herring,  which  at  this  season  can  be  caught  in  nets 
by  the  millions,  is  sold  so  cheaply  that  $5  will  buy  enough  to  fill 
a  barrel  and  supply  a  family  with  salt  fish  for  the  rest  of  the 
year.  Before  the  frosts  are  over  the  spinach  and  lettuce  of  the 
city  market  are  duplicated  by  various  spring  greens  which  are  to 
be  had  for  the  cutting  throughout  the  fields  of  the  Southland. 
In  many  parts  of  the  country  a  law  permits  every  man  to  pasture 


EASY  LIVING  IN  AMERICA  605 

one  cow  along  the  roadsides,  and  in  other  districts  pasture  for  a 
cow  can  be  had  for  $1  or  $2  per  month.  This  family  cow,  giving 
from  four  to  twelve  quarts  of  milk  per  day,  is  a  cheaper  source 
of  supply  than  the  city  milkman,  charging  from  ten  to  twenty 
cents  per  quart.  In  May  and  June,  wild  strawberries  are  to 
be  had  for  the  picking,  as  are  also  the  black-heart  and  red-heart 
cherries.  These  cherry  trees  grow  wild  along  the  fences  and 
open  woods  on  thousands  of  roomy  farms  from  Pennsylvania 
southward,  yields  of  ten  bushels  per  tree  are  not  uncommon,  and 
the  fruit  is  often  wasted  because  there  is  no  one  to  use  it. 
After  the  strawberries  and  cherries  come  raspberries,  and  the 
raspberry  season  merges  into  the  blackberry  season.  These  two 
productive  briars  are  regarded  as  weeds  over  a  territory  covering 
a  million  square  miles  in  the  United  States  and  in  most  of  this 
region  it  is  common  custom  for  any  one  to  pick  the  wild  berries 
wherever  they  may  be  found  away  from  the  immediate  vicinity 
of  a  farmhouse.  The  blackberry  season  merges  into  that  of  the 
huckleberry,  which  grows  in  such  abundance  in  swamps  and  on 
mountainsides  that  it  has  no  sale  value  whatever  before  it  has 
been  picked.  After  huckleberries  come  peaches,  which  grow  wild 
like  the  cherries  along  the  fence  rows  in  some  localities.  In 
autumn  comes  the  persimmon,  sweetened  by  freezing,  to  hang 
upon  the  trees  all  winter  waiting  to  be  eaten.  A  bushel  of  apples 
is  usually  to  be  had  for  a  small  fraction  of  the  day's  wage 
of  an  unskilled  laborer.  In  the  lowlands  and  on  the  moist  hill- 
sides the  black  walnut,  which  is  almost  as  nutritious  as  the  high- 
priced  English  walnut  (Persian  walnut),  is  so  common  that  it 
often  lies  ungathered  on  the  ground  as  do  hickory  nuts  by  the 
millions  of  bushels.  Before  the  first  frost  the  chestnut  burrs  in 
the  mountain  districts  open  and  this  sweet  nut  not  only  provides 
an  important  food  supply,  but  also  becomes  a  money  crop  of  no 
mean  importance.  The  people  roam  at  will  through  the  woods 
picking  up  chestnuts  for  shipment  to  all  the  great  cities  of  the 
northern  and  central  part  of  the  country. 

The  generosities  of  nature  do  not  end  here.  The  natural  meat- 
supply  is  not  limited  to  fish.  In  late  August  and  September  the 
young  squirrels  are  full  grown,  and  a  good  hunter  can  at  times 
get  five  or  ten  in  a  morning.  With  the  coming  of  frost  the 
opossum  is  fat ;  colored  men  in  the  South  sometimes  report  the 


606  HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR 

catching  of  sixty  opossums  in  a  single  season.  This  meat  supply 
is  quite  as  abundant  as  that  bought  with  the  wages  earned  by 
arduously  digging  a  sewer  or  working  on  a  trolley  track  on  a 
noisy  street.  Moreover,  opossum  hunting  is  generally  considered 
better  fun  than  is  digging  a  sewer.  With  the  falling  leaves  the 
oak  trees  shower  down  their  acorns,  the  natural  food  of  the  hog. 
Often  allowed  to  run  at  large  in  the  forests,  by  December  these 
hogs  are  fat  enough  to  slaughter  for  the  year's  supply  of  ham 
and  bacon. 

In  addition  to  these  free  offerings  of  nature,  almost  every 
family  in  the  country  districts  and  small  towns  of  this  part  of 
the  United  States  has  a  garden  where  the  common  vegetables  can 
be  grown,  as  well  as  tobacco,  the  sweet  potato,  and  a  few  hills 
of  peanuts.  The  "roasting  ear,"  the  partly  ripened  ear  of 
corn,  is  a  great  standby  of  the  summer  diet. 

The  working  man  in  this  region  has  two  alternatives.  He  may 
work  regularly,  get  wages  and  buy  food,  or  he  may  work  oc- 
casionally on  the  farm  and  get  an  equal  amount  of  food  by  going 
hunting,  fishing,  or  berrying.  In  fact,  a  very  large  part  of  the 
laboring  class  in  the  southern  and  southeastern  part  of  the 
United  States  will  not  accept  a  regular  job  by  the  year.  Even 
the  pressure  of  the  Great  War  could  not  entirely  change  it. 
This  ease  of  getting  a  living  has  exercised  profound  influence 
in  checking  the  development  of  manufactures  and  making  the 
contrast  between  America  and  Europe,  or  America  and  the 
Orient,  so  striking  that  millions  yearn  to  come  to  America  as 
to  a  land  of  opportunity. 

THE  EXACTING   DEMANDS   OF   MANUFACTURE 

Manufactured  goods  are  produced  in  a  factory,  where  work 
begins  on  Monday  morning  at  the  blow  of  the  whistle  and  con- 
tinues on  a  schedule  until  Saturday  afternoon.  The  demand  on 
labor  is  exacting.  But  the  people  of  Europe,  the  people  of  Japan, 
and  the  people  of  China  are  glad  of  the  chance  to  earn  a  living 
in  this  way.  They  cannot  go  fishing,  or  hunting,  or  berrying, 
or  nutting. 

The  average  population  of  the  United  States  is  less  than  50 
per  square  mile,  that  of  Germany  is  290;  that  of  Holland  is 


WHAT  MAKES  LAND  HUNGER  607 

454 ;  and  that  of  Belgium  is  645,  or  more  than  one  person  to  each 
acre.  As  previously  stated  Japan  has  a  population  of  more  than 
2,500  per  cultivated  square  mile.  This  dense  population  requires 
much  food ;  that  need  in  turn  makes  necessary  the  careful  culti- 
vation of  land ;  and  the  consequent  high  yields  give  the  land  a 
high  price,  often  several  hundred  dollars  an  acre.  It  often  costs 
as  much  to  rent  a  field  for  a  single  year  in  Japan  or  Italy  as  it 
does  to  buy  land  in  the  southern  or  eastern  part  of  the  United 
States.  In  these  closely  cultivated  territories,  there  are  no  fence 
rows  with  berry  bushes,  fruit  and  nut  trees  because  there  are  no 
fences.  All  the  land  is  tilled,  and  one  man's  grain  field  touches 
his  neighbor's  as  do  two  connecting  lawns  with  no  fence  between. 
The  roadsides  are  often  lined  with  fruit  trees,  but  the  fruit  is 
not  a  free  gift  of  nature  to  be  taken  by  any  one  in  the  neigh- 
borhood, but  a  crop  grown  by  the  farmer  or  even  by  the  local 
government  and  sold  like  any  other  crop.  He  who  eats  the 
product  of  the  land  must  either  produce  it  with  much  labor  or 
buy  it  with  hard-won  money.  Food  prices  are  high,  and  wages 
are  low.  Under  these  conditions  people  must  work,  and  work 
regularly ;  the  great  difficulty  is  to  get  a  chance  to  labor.  Thus 
the  factories  can  easily  get  laborers  and  northwestern  Europe 
with  its  dense  population  has  become  a  veritable  hive  of  manu- 
facturing industries.  The  great  concern  of  the  young  man  for 
his  future  and  of  the  parent  for  his  child  is  that  he  may  get  a 
job.  What  is  there  for  the  young  Dutchman  or  Belgian  to  do? 
Every  farm  is  tilled.  Perhaps  the  factories  are  full.  The  young 
man  therefore  thinks  of  emigrating,  or  at  least  of  getting  a  job 
in  some  foreign  place. 

The  cultivated  part  of  Japan  supports  about  four  persons 
to  the  acre,  or  a  family  of  five  to  one  and  one-fourth  acres.  The 
food  requirements  and  land  requirements  for  a  family  of  five 
in  the  state  of  Georgia  are  set  forth  by  Andrew  H.  Soule,  presi- 
dent of  the  Georgia  Agricultural  College,  in  a  hearing  before  a 
committee  of  the  United  States  Senate  in  1917.* 

*  Standard  dietary  for  adult  male. — Protein,  663  calories;  fat,  93< 
calories;  carbohydrates,  1,761  calories;  total,  3,360  calories. 

For  adult  female.— Protein,  442  calories;  fat,  515  calories;  carbohy- 
drates, 1,175  calories;  total,  2,132  calories. 

For  girl  of  sixteen. — Protein,  612  calories;  fat,  410  calories;  carbohy- 
drates, 1,275  calories;  total,  2,197  calories. 


608  HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR 

Whereas  the  Japanese  family  has  one  and  one-fourth  acres,  Mr. 
Soule  states  that  the  Georgia  family  should  have  ten  acres  in 
crops  in  addition  to  the  equal  or  greater  area  required  to  support 
the  two  cows,  the  yearling  beef,  and  the  ten  or  fifteen  pigs.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  land  in  America  is  so  abundant  that  the  family 
does  have  all  this  land;  yet  the  South  may  still,  without  much 
exaggeration,  be  said  to  lie  undeveloped. 

That  contrast  between  Japan  and  Georgia,  between  one  and 
one-fourth  and  twenty  or  more  acres  per  family,  is  the  stuff  of 
which  war  is  made.  It  provides  the  motive  of  land  hunger,  which 
may  arise  most  naturally,  without  the  aid  of  any  bad  actions  or 
bad  intentions  on  the  part  of  individuals.  Dr.  Isaiah  Bowman, 

Fdr  child  of  twelve. — Protein,  665  calories;  fat,  410  calories;  carbo- 
hydrates, 1,175  calories;  total,  2,250  calories. 

For  child  of  six.~- Protein,  565  calories;  fat,  410  calories;  carbohydrates, 
325  calories;  total,  1,600  calories. 

FEEDING  THE  AVERAGE  MAN 

To  furnish  the  food  units  needed  by  an  adult  man  weighing  154  pounds, 
doing  active  muscular  work,  it  would  be  necessary  to  provide  the  following 
amounts  of  food  daily  or  satisfactory  substitutes  therefor: 

Calories 

4  eggs  ( with  fat  to  cook ) 400 

2  glasses   milk 300 

%  Ib.  steak  or  other  lean  meat 660 

%  pound  butter   800 

4  slices  bacon   200 

Lima  beans  (one-half  cup,  cooked) 100 

Corn  (one-half  cup,  cooked) 100 

Potatoes  ( 10  ounces,  cooked ) 200 

6  slices  wheat  bread  or  equivalent  of  corn  or  wheat  flour 

substitute 600 

Sugar   (4  tablespoonsful  in  dessert  or  beverage) 300 

Total  3,660 

FOOD  REQUIREMENTS  FOB  A  FAMILY  OF  FIVE 

The  following  supplies  of  food  will  be  required  to  provide  a  family  of 
five  for  one  year  with  rations  based  on  the  above  standard  dietary: 

4  barrels  flour  or  substitutes  therefor,  such  as  peanuts,  potatoes, 

and  soy  beans. 
12  bushels  corn  meal   (some  of  this  to  be  used  as  breakfast  cereal 

and  wheat  substitute). 

728  gallons  milk  (this  to  take  care  of  butter). 
225  pounds  bacon. 
150  pounds  lard. 

1,000  pounds  fresh  meat  (pork,  beef,  chickens,  fish). 
250  dozen  eggs. 


LAND  PER  FAMILY  609 

director  of  the  American  Geographical  Society,  called  the  atten- 
tion of  his  class  in  Yale  University  in  June,  1914,  to  the  fact  that 
the  population  on  the  west  side  of  the  Franco-German  boundary 
was  scanty,  while  that  on  the  east  side  was  dense.  "Therefore," 
said  he,  "sooner  or  later  there  is  sure  to  be  war  across  that 
boundary  because  of  the  heavy  population,  land  hunger,  on  one 
side,  and  the  scanty  population  with  relatively  unused  land  on 
the  other."  He  did  not  expect  the  war  to  begin  the  next 
month,  but  it  did.  The  land  hungry,  often  physically  hungry, 
millions  of  China  and  Japan  looking  across  the  Pacific  at 
empty  California,  empty  British  Columbia,  and  empty  Aus- 
tralia, are  in  a  natural  position  to  have  the  keenest  kind  of  land 
hunger.  They  want  to  come  and  settle  in  these  lands.  They 

10  bushels  fresh  fruit. 

100  quarts  canned  fruit  (5  to  6  bushels  when  fresh). 
25  gallons  sirup 
40  bushels  sweet  potatoes. 
40  bushels  Irish  potatoes. 

One-half  acre  in  vegetables  in  successive  plantings  (This  will 
provide  an  abundance  of  fresh  vegetables  and  500  quarts  of 
canned  vegetables  for  winter  use.) 

LAND  NEEDED  TO  GROW  FOOD  FOB  FAMILY  OF  FIVE 

To  grow  the  food  called  for  in  the  foregoing  table,  the  following  acreage 
will  be  required: 

One-half  acre  of  carefully  cultivated  and  well  fertilized  ground  should 
be  devoted  to  vegetables  planted  in  proper  sequence  and  succession 

One-half  acre  should  be  devoted  to  orchards,  which  will  supply  a  variety 
of  fruits  such  as  peaches,  apples,  grapes,  and  figs. 

One-half  acre  should  be  planted  to  melons. 

One  acre  to  legumes,  such  as  field  beans,  cowpeas,  peanuts,  and  soy  beans, 
to  be  used  either  in  their  natural  state  or,  in  the  case  of  the  two  latter 
crops,  as  flour  substitutes. 

One-half  acre  in  sorghum  cane  for  sirup. 

One  acre  in  sweet  potatoes. 

One  acre  in  Irish  potatoes,  one-half  planted  in  the  spring  and  one-half 
in  the  fall. 

Two  acres  in  corn. 

Three  acres  in  wheat. 

On  thin  or  poorly  fertilized  and  prepared  land,  the  acres  of  most  of 
these  crops  would  probably  need  to  be  increased.  On  particularly  rich 
and  well-managed  lands  the  area  indicated  might  be  cut  down  considerably. 
In  this  connection,  it  is  proper  to  remember  that  these  areas  should  be 
doubled  if  the  cultivator  of  the  soil  is  to  grow  a  surplus  of  these  products 
for  the  use  of  our  urban  population.  In  addition,  each  family  of  five  will 
require  the  milk  and  butter  derived  from  two  good  cows  which  are 
properly  fed  and  cared  for;  the  meat  obtained  from  the  progeny  of  two 
brood  sows  and  one  yearling  beef,  and  the  chickens  and  eggs  available  from 
a  flock  of  fifty  hens. 


610  HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR 

have  started  to  do  so,  but  the  white  man  keeps  them  out  for  the 
best  of  reasons,  from  his  point  of  view.  He  knows  that  in  a 
short  time  these  districts  would  become  lands  of  the  Mongolian. 
Because  of  their  habit  of  working  harder  and  living  less  expen- 
sively, the  Chinese  and  Japanese  could  pay  more  for  the  land 
than  the  white  man  could  pay.  Community  after  community 
would  become  Chinese  and  Japanese,  and  the  white  men  would 
move  away.  There  would  be  no  end  to  the  process,  for  the  more 
that  came  the  more  there  would  be  to  come.  Emigration  is  no 
cure  for  overpopulation.  It  is  merely  an  encouragement,  a  kind 
of  free  inheritance  for  the  children.  Thus  would  Mongolia  ad- 
vance into  Caucasia.  Therefore,  we  pass  exclusion  acts;  but 
they  are  no  cure  for  land  hunger.  They  are  an  aggravation. 
They  are  an  insult  to  a  proud,  sensitive,  intelligent,  and  powerful 
people.  They  are  not  only  an  insult ;  they  are  a  dare.  Yet  the 
possession  of  a  piece  of  land  by  a  people  and  their  government 
of  it  by  themselves  is  one  of  the  conditions  upon  which  ap- 
parently a  union  of  nations  must  be  made.  How  can  the  gov- 
ernment survive  if  it  excludes  other  peoples  and  continually 
exposes  them  to  land  hunger  ? 

It  would,  of  course,  greatly  facilitate  world  peace  if  all  nations 
had  developed  to  about  the  same  degree  their  utilization  of 
resources.  Unfortunately  they  have  not;  and  the  almost  static 
population  of  Australia  and  France  affords  remote  prospect  of 
such  uniformity. 

How  can  the  danger  from  land  hunger  be  reduced  ?  It  cannot 
be  removed  while  the  difference  of  ratio  between  men  and 
resources  lasts,  but  we  must  mitigate  it  so  far  as  possible  by  the 
abolishing  restrictions  on  trade.  The  free  exchange  of  commodi- 
ties will  make  it  easy  to  share  the  advantages  of  exclusive  pos- 
session of  territory  and  to  reduce  the  need  which  densely  peopled 
China  and  Japan  must  feel  for  the  empty  lands  of  the  white  man 
in  Australia,  California,  and  British  Columbia. 

International  trade  thus  becomes  one  of  the  great  cares  of  those 
who  would  organize  the  world  for  peace  and  permit  man's  food 
supply  to  increase. 

The  question  of  tariffs  is  the  chief  problem  in  determining 
trade  policy.  The  reasons  for  tariffs,  recognized  by  economists, 
are  (a)  the  protection  of  infant  industries,  which  can  be  aided 


TRADE  MAKES  WEALTH  611 

by  bounties  as  well  as  by  tariffs,  and  often  are  so  aided,  and  (6) 
the  industrial  completeness  necessary  for  war.  Closely  akin  to 
the  first  argument  is  the  need  of  protection  of  industry  in  any 
country  from  the  practice  of  dumping,  that  is,  of  selling  surplus 
at  less  than  cost  in  a  distant  market  in  order  to  avoid  a  break 
in  price  in  the  customary  market.  This  practice  is  a  frequent 
fact  in  the  demoralization  of  trade;  it  may  also  be  deliberately 
used  by  the  producers  of  one  country  to  stifle  rivals  that  promise 
to  develop  competition  in  other  countries.  Fortunately,  how- 
ever, this  undoubted  evil  can  be  controlled  without  the  establish- 
ment of  any  general  tariff  system.  It  has  in  fact  already  been 
dealt  with  by  the  legislation  of  Canada  and  several  other  coun- 
tries by  the  establishment  of  anti-dumping  statutes.  Under  these 
laws  foreign  goods  may  not  be  sold  in  the  country  of  import  for 
smaller  prices  than  they  bring  in  the  country  of  production. 

The  second  reason  for  maintaining  tariffs  is  much  more  potent 
and  looms  particularly  large  in  the  present  moment;  that  is  the 
necessity  of  developing  a  variety  of  industries  in  the  attempt  to 
produce  the  astonishing  industrial  completeness  necessary  for 
war.  There  is  almost  no  limit  to  the  application  of  this  philoso- 
phy since  war  has  itself  become  industrial.  All  economists  rec- 
ognize in  the  tariff  a  factor  increasing  the  cost  of  living  in  the 
country  possessing  it.  In  other  words,  tariff,  except  as  a  pro- 
tector of  infant  industries,  tends  to  impoverish;  it  puts  up  the 
price.  Conversely,  free  trade  tends  to  enrich  by  giving  the  im- 
porting country  the  advantage  of  the  specialization  that  may  be 
developed  in  every  other  country.  An  example  of  impoverish- 
ment by  tariff  is  Portugal,  a  country  that  insists  on  taxing  every- 
thing that  comes  into  it,  and  has  thus  forced  the  cost  of  living 
to  a  fearful  height  and  ground  its  people  down  to  the  point  of 
malnutrition.  An  example  of  enrichment  by  free  trade,  is  the 
prosperity  of  England  and  Holland,  with  cheap  supplies  and  a 
low  cost  of  living  based  on  the  use  of  goods  from  the  world's 
cheapest  markets.  Hungry  Portugal,  on  the  other  hand,  has  to 
buy  in  the  high-tariff  market  and  sell  in  the  cheap  markets  in 
competition  with  all  the  world. 

At  the  present  moment  the  pains  and  perils  of  the  Great  War 
have  served  to  emphasize  the  importance  of  tariffs  as  factors 
aiding  the  industrial  completeness  necessary  for  national  defense. 


612  HUNGER,  TRADE,  AND  WAR 

We  have,  however,  already  passed  the  point  where  this  is  pos- 
sible as  a  general  policy  for  the  nations  of  the  world.  We  have 
developed  population  and  trade  too  far;  industry  and  war  have 
become  too  complex  for  any  nation  to  hope  to  be  commercially 
independent,  even  if  its  variety  of  resources  is  as  great  as  that  of 
the  United  States.  Every  one  knows  that  England  and  Hol- 
land, France  and  Norway  are  dependent  on  the  sea;  but  so  also 
is  the  United  States.  Its  vast  steel  industry  could  be  ruined  by 
cutting  off  the  supplies  of  imported  ores  used  for  hardening  the 
metal. 

As  trade  grows,  we  tend  to  become  less  independent  rather 
than  more  independent.  Science,  while  it  may  in  a  sense  make 
the  commercial  independence  of  nations  possible,  does  so  only  at 
the  price  of  discomfort  and  waste  of  resource.  A  nation  like 
England  could  be  almost  entirely  independent  only  with  a  scanty 
population  one-fourth  or  one-tenth  that  which  might  live  there 
in  comfort  with  a  fully  developed  trade.  The  natural  tendency 
of  trade  is  to  develop  ever-increasing  dependence  because  of  the 
increasing  variety  of  products  that  enter  into  our  daily  life. 
Thus  China  for  ages  was  a  world  to  herself.  She  scorned  the 
outside  world,  which  could  bring  her  nothing  that  she  herself  did 
not  have.  But  in  this  age  of  science,  she  wants  our  machines 
and  our  specialized  productions.  Economic  independence  is 
practically  undesirable  and  impossible.  Would  that  it  might  not 
linger  in  men's  minds  to  menace  the  world's  peace  for  decades! 

Tariffs  cannot  make  even  the  United  States  independent  in 
war,  although,  if  deliberately  used  for  that  purpose,  they  could 
make  the  country  nearly  independent,  at  great  cost  in  increased 
living  expenses  and  inefficiency  of  industry.  For  the  conduct  of 
a  war  a  nation  needs  access  to  the  sea  or  colossal  preparation  such 
as  Germany  made,  followed  by  almost  instantaneous  success,  such 
as  Germany  failed  to  achieve. 

Every  year  science  is  making  military  completeness  less  pos- 
sible, attack  more  deadly,  and  isolation  such  as  comforted  the 
past  of  China  and  the  United  States  more  unthinkable.  The 
provincial  past,  the  nationalistic  past,  is  gone,  for  isolation  is 
gone.  The  world  has  given  hostages  to  peace.  Our  century  of 
world  trade  has  already  developed  interdependence  of  nations 
and  dependence  on  the  sea  and  ships,  which  compel  us  to  maintain 


THE  WORLD  MUST  UNITE  IN  TRADE  613 

this  commerce  to  relapse  into  a  past  epoch  of  small  population  or 
obedience  to  some  tyrant.  The  Revolutionary  motto,  "Unite  or 
Die,"  used  to  bring  the  American  colonies  together,  was  never 
more  applicable  than  today  and  now  it  applies  to  the  nations  of 
the  world.  We  must  unite  in  world  organization  with  a  free  sea 
permitting  a  great  world  trade,  or  enter  upon  an  epoch  of  mili- 
tarism with  the  chance  of  being  forcibly  united  by  some  world 
conqueror  who  would  take  a  rich  world  tribute. 

We  have  some  chance  of  keeping  the  lust  of  dominion  under 
control  if  it  does  not  form  an  alliance  with  land  hunger.  To 
prevent  this  union,  we  must  weaken  land  hunger  by  establishing 
freedom  of  trade.  By  this  means  we  may  succeed  in  forming  a 
world  organization  that  can  keep  in  check  the  two  great  national 
appetites :  the  lust  for  power  and  the  lust  for  land. 


FOOD   VALUES  (AVERAGE) 
(From  Bulletin  No.  28,  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture1) 


Food  Material 

a 
a>  a> 
01  u 

3 

oj  <u 

~^- 

a 
*•£ 

<D  ° 

"S  u 

i.     4) 

£-- 

5S 

4,  0 

"o  <- 

t,  4, 

-- 

a 

• 
B 

•w  t* 
«4> 

-- 

Total 
Carbohydrate 
Per  cent. 

4) 
«      at 

*£* 

si--2 

-    -_   -: 

---- 

I    CEREALS  AND  SUBSTITUTES: 
Wheat  flour,  entire  wheat  

11.4 

13.8 

1.9 

71  9 

1675 

Wheat    flour,    patent    roller    proc- 
oss    hi^h   grade          

124 

11.2 

1.0 

740 

1645 

Wheat    shredded    

96 

12.1 

1.8 

752 

1700 

Potatoes    pvap     a    p  .2  

7.1 

85 

.4 

800 

1680 

Potatoes,  fresh,  a    p  

783 

2.2 

.1 

184 

385 

Potatoes   sweet   fresh,  &•  p  

552 

1.4 

.6 

21  0 

460 

Bananas,  yellow,   a.   p  

35 

480 

.8 

.4 

143 

300 

Rye  flour             

11  4 

136 

20 

71  5 

1665 

Corn  flour  

126 

7.1 

1.3 

78.4 

1645 

Corn    creen    canned   

76  1 

28 

1  2 

10 

455 

Barley  flour    

11  0 

105 

22 

72.8 

1640 

Biotes  (acorns)    cd   por  '  

4.1 

8  1 

374 

480 

2620 

73 

16.1 

7.2 

675 

1860 

Oatmeal    boiled    

84.5 

28 

.5 

11  5 

285 

Ricp            

123 

8.0 

.3 

700 

1630 

Rice,  boiled  

725 

28 

.1 

244 

510 

353 

02 

1  3 

53  1 

1215 

5  0 

0  8 

0  1 

73  1 

192*) 

103 

13  4 

o 

74.1 

1665 

000 

1675 

Starch    tapioca    a   p  

11  4 

4 

1 

88.0 

1650 

II    MEATS  AND  SUBSTITUTES: 
Sirloin  steak,  a.  p  

12.8 

540 

165 

16  1 

085 

Neck  of  beef                

27  6 

45  0 

14  5 

11  0 

1165 

Bacon    smoked,  medium  fat  

7  7 

174 

0  1 

622 

2705 

Corned   beef    

51  8 

26  3 

18  7 

1280 

Frankfort    a    p  

57  2 

10  6 

186 

1.1 

1170 

Fowls,  a.   p  

250 

47  1 

13  7 

123 

775 

Halibut,  steaks  or  sections,  a.  p..  . 
Ham,  smoked,  fat  medium,  a.  p... 
Herring    whole,  a.  p  

17.7 
13  6 
42  6 

61  0 
348 
41  7 

153 
142 
11  2 

44 
334 
3.0 

470 
1675 
375 

Cod,  dressed,  a.  p  
Salmon    canned    a   p  

20.0 
14  2 

585 
56  8 

11.1 
10  5 

.2 
75 

215 
680 

Kggs,  hen,  uncooked,  a.  p  

737 

13.4 

105 

720 

Milk,  whole,  a    p  

87  0 

33 

40 

5.0 

325 

Milk,  skimmed,  a.  p  

005 

3.4 

.3 

5.1 

170 

1  Many  other  food  analyses  -are  given  in  this  bulletin. 
3  a.  p .  =  as  purchased. 
*  ed.  por.  =  edible  portion. 

616 


616 


FOOD  VALUES 


Food  Material 


Milk,  condensed,  unsweetened,  a.  p.  68.2 

Buttermilk,  a.  p 91.0 

Cheese,  cottage,  a.  p 72.0 

Cheese,  full  cream,  a.  p 34.2 

Beans,  dried,  a.  p 12.6 

Lentils,  dried,  a.  p 8.4 

Peas,  dried,  a.  p 9.5 

Peas,  green,  ed.  por 74.6 

Almonds,  ed.  por 4.8 

Macaroons,  a.  p 12.3 

Brazil  nuts,  ed.  por 5.3 

Hickory  nuts,  ed.  por 3.7 

Pecans,  ed.  por 2.7 

Walnuts,  Cal.  soft  shell,  ed.  por..  .  2.5 

Peanuts,  ed.  por 9.2 

III.  FATS  (see  also  above,  Cheese, 

and     nuts     [including    al- 
monds and  acorns] ) : 

Butter,  a.  p 11.0 

Clear  fat    (beef) 13.4 

Lard,  unrefined 4.8 

Oil,  pure  (peanut,  cottonseed,  olive, 

coconut )     

Coconut,  ed.  por 14.1 

Chocolate,  a.  p 5.9 

Cocoa,   a.   p 4.6 

IV.  FIBROUS  AND  GREEN  VEGETA- 

BLES: 

Beets,  fresh,  ed.  por 87.5 

Cabbage,  ed.  por 91.5 

Carrots,  evap.,  ed.  por 3.5 

Carrots,  fresh  88.2 

Onions,  fresh,  ed.  por 87.6 

Spinach,  fresh,  a.  p 92.3 

Tomatoes,  fresh,  a.  p 94.0 

Lettuce,  ed.  por 94.7 

V.  FRUITS  : 

Apples,  a.  p 63.3 

Oranges,   a.  p 27.0      63.4 

Persimmons,  ed.  por 66.1 

Grapes,   a.   p 25.0      58.0 

Paisins,  a.  p 10.0      13.1 

Apricots,  dried  a.  p 29.4 

Dates,  a.  p 10.0      13.8 

Figs,  a.  p 18.8 

Prunes,  a.  p 15.0      19.0 

VI.  SUGARS  : 

Granulated  sugar,  a.  p 

Candy,  a.  p 

Molasses,  cane,  a.  p 25.1 


9.6 

3.0 
20.9 
25.9 
22.5 
25.7 
24.6 

7.0 
21.0 

6.5 
17.0 
15.4 

9.6 
16.6 
25.8 


1.0 
4.1 
2.2 


5.7 
12.9 
21.6 


1.6 
1.6 
7.7 
1.1 
1.6 
2.1 
1.2 
1.2 

.4 

.6 

.8 

1.0 

2.3 

4.7 

1.9 

4.3 

1.8 


2.4 


9.3 

.5 

1.0 

33.7 

1.8 

1.0 

1.0 

.5 

54.9 
15.2 
66.8 
67.4 
70.5 
63.4 
38.6 


85.0 
82.1 
94.0 

100.0 
50.6 

48.7 
28.9 


.1 
.3 

3.6 
.4 
.3 

4.1 
.2 
.3 

.5 

.1 

.7 

1.2 

3.0 

1.0 

2.5 

.3 


11.2 

4.8 

4.3 

2.4 

59.6 

59.2 

62.0 

16.9 

17.3 

65.2 

7.0 

11.4 

15.3 

16.1 

24.4 


27.9 
30.3 
37.7 


9.7 
5.6 
80.3 
9.3 
9.9 
2.6 
4.0 
2.9 

14.2 
8.5 
31.5 
14.4 
68.5 
62.5 
70.6 
74.2 
62.2 

100.0 
96.0 
69.3 


INDEX 


Abyssinia,  488 

Acids,  366 

Acorn  bread,  561 

Acorns,  544,  560 

Africa,  cattle  prospects,  235;  coffee 
growing,  496;  millet  and  sor- 
ghum, 137;  oranges,  436;  sheep, 
292 

Agricultural  Experiment  Stations, 
537 

Agriculture,  chief  object  in  the 
United  States  and  Canada,  177; 
China,  520;  forage  as  the  basis, 
188,  198;  haphazard  methods, 
535;  intensive,  254;  interesting 
division,  188;  Japan,  520;  oxen 
and,  209 ;  resources  of  the  tem- 
perate zones,  522;  tree  crops  in- 
stead of  grain  crops,  542;  trop- 
ics, soundness  and  richness,  595; 
two-story,  554 

Airplanes,  possibility,  593 

Alaska,  herring,  351;  oat  crop,  79; 
reindeer,  211;  resources,  525; 
salmon,  342 

Albermarle  Pippin,  385 

Alberta,  267 

Alcohol,  185,  186 

Alfalfa,  387;  Argentina,  230;  cat- 
tle industry  and,  222,  223;  ex- 
periment with  cows,  197 ;  har- 
vesting, 191,  194;  United  States 
acreage,  196;  usefulness  in  the 
corn-belt,  197 

Alfalfa  meal,   194 

Algaroba,  554 

Algeria,  wheat  crop,  44  • 

Algoma,  407 

Allegheny  region,  peach-belt,  399 

Allspice,  515 

Almeria,  419,  447 

Almonds,  wild,  551 

Altoona,  Pa.,  food  survey,  567,  568, 
569 

Amazon  Valley,  cacao  growing,  508 

Ammonia,  60,   106,  528 

Animal  nutrition,  185 

617 


Animals,  breeding,  539 

Animals,  domestic,  American  agri- 
culture and,  177;  cattle  migra- 
tion, 222;  food  supply  for,  188; 
in  sparsely  populated  lands,  180; 
Italy,  feeding,  179;  Oriental 
nations  and,  178;  southern 
hemisphere,  181;  United  States, 
180,  181;  value,  188;  see  also 
Cattle 

Animals,  draft,  188;  enumeration 
of  serviceable,  200;  of  general 
distribution,  200;  of  special  lo- 
cation, 211;  our  dependence  on, 
199;  possibilities  of  production, 
214 

Annapolis  Valley,  390 

Antarctic,  cereal  for,  76 

Appalachia,  sheep  industry,  287 ; 
tree  crops,  545;  usefulness  of 
corn,  109 

Appetizers,  173 

Apple-pie  Ridge,  384 

Apples,  377 ;  as  a  supply  crop  and 
as  a  money  crop,  381;  Canadian 
growing,  390;  distribution  of 
tree  in  America,  379;  drying, 
418;  Europe  and  Asia,  391;  ex- 
cepional  prices,,  391;  fertilized 
and  non-fertilized  trees,  392,  393 ; 
future  supply,  394;  grafting 
frosted  trees,  391;  growing  in 
New  York  and  Michigan,  382; 
Mississippi  Valley  and  Ozark  pla- 
teau, 385;  Ohio,  Pennsylvania, 
and  Virginia,  383;  orchard  pro- 
tection from  frost,  388;  refrigera- 
tion, 389 ;  Rocky  Mountains  and 
the  Northwest,  387 ;  south  tem- 
perate zone,  394;  spraying  or- 
chard in  Virginia,  378 ;  United 
States  industry,  extent,  389; 
United  States  regions  of  com- 
mercial growing,  383;  ^wasteful 
transportation,  507 

Apricots,  403,  412;  example  of 
dried  fruit  trade,  421 

Arabia,  coffee  growing,  489;  dates, 
424 


618 


INDEX 


Arabs,  grass  fires  among,  191; 
wheat  harvesting,  32;  see  also 
Bedouins 

Arctic,  canned  food,  408;  cereals 
for,  76,  80 

Argentina,  alfalfa,  230;  animal 
abundance,  181,  183;  beef  supply, 
prospects,  236;  cattle,  231;  cattle 
migration,  222;  cattle  raising, 
230 ;  corn  production  and  export, 
128,  129;  dairy  products,  265; 
dried  fruits,  425 ;  sheep  industry, 
282;  sugar  industry,  471;  wheat 
exports,  51;  wheat  growing,  36; 
wheat  in  1918,  10;  wheat  possi- 
bilities, 54 

Arid  lands,  barley  as  food  in,  82; 
tree  crops  for,  549 

Arizona,  irrigation  of  citrous  fruit 
trees,  440;  orange  growing,  439 

Arkansas,  rice  fields,  102,  104 

Armour  &  Co.,  226,  233 

Armsby,  Mr.,  185 

Aroostook  County,  Me.,  150,  153 

Asia,  apple  growing,  391;  corn-belt 
in  southeast,  128;  millet,  135; 
oranges,  436;  resources  in  west- 
ern, 525;  wheat  growing,  45 

Asia  Minor,  cattle,  229;  sheep,  291 

Asiatic  monsoon,  87,  88 

Asparagus,  374 

Ass.     See  Donkeys 

Assam,  497,  501,  502 

Asti,  486 

Atlantic  plain,  369;  canning  indus- 
try, 410 

Australia,  animals  and  meat,  183 ; 
dairy  industry,  264;  dried  fruit, 
425;  rabbits,  312;  sheep,  276, 
279,  280;  sugar-cane  land,  480; 
wheat  in  1918,  10;  wheat  region, 
24 

Automobiles,  215,  413;  see  also 
Motor  trucks 

Avocado,  596 

Ayrshire,  Scotland,  268 

Azores,  436 


B 


Bacon,   173,   174,  300 

Bacon  hog,  300 

Bacteria,  357 

Bagasse,  482,  483 

Bagdad,  424,  526 

Bailey,  Joseph,  416 

Bailey,  L.  H.,   155 

Baker,  0.  E.    See  Finch  and  Baker 


Baltimore,  344,  410 

Banana  flour,  170 

Bananas,  as  a  money  crop,  169; 
Costa  Rica  plantation,  165;  cul- 
tivation, 163 ;  European  supply, 
166,  167;  importance  in  Carib- 
bean countries,  168;  possibilities, 
170;  price,  168;  ripeness,  171; 
trade  in  the  United  States,  168; 
transportation  and  commerce, 
166,  168;  United  States  con- 
sumption, 166 

Banda  Islands,  513 

Bangkok,  98,  99 

Barbados,  590;  sugar  industry, 
472,  473 

Barley,  importance  in  arid  lands, 
82;  range  in  the  United  States, 
82,  83 ;  region  of  growth,  80 ;  use, 
81 

Barley  flour,  83 

Barrett  Mfg.  Co.,  392 

Basra,  424 

Beach  plums,  403 

Beans,  358;  algaroba,  554;  soy, 
326 ;  velvet,  523 ;  see  also  Soy 
beans 

Beasts  of  burden.  See  Animals, 
draft 

Becket,  Mass.,  109 

Bedouins,  animal  industry,  189; 
breadstuff,  81;  see  also  Arabs 

Bee  culture,  485 

Beech,  Joseph,   581 

Beef,  prospects  of  increase,  236; 
United  States  exports,  1912-18,  9 

Beef  cattle  and  cows,  255 

Beef  extract,  231 

Beef  industry,  216 

Beet  sugar.     See  under  Sugar 

Beets,  as  source  of  sugar,  456;  by- 
products, 459 ;  European  acreage, 
459 ;  European  centers  of  produc- 
tion, 461;  forage,  New  England, 
287 ;  growing  for  sugar  in  the 
United  States,  457,  466 
'Belgium,  rabbits,  312;  resources, 
519;  sugar  crop,  460,  461;  utiliza- 
tion of  resources,  580;  view  of 
small  fields,  184;  wheat  crop, 
43 

Ben  Davis  apple,  387 

Bennett,  H.   H.,  597 

Beri-beri,    92,   243 

Bermuda,  banana  crop,  170;  pota- 
toes, 150 

Bingen,  448 

Bison,  199,  243 


INDEX 


619 


Black  Sea  Basin,  as  corn  region, 
124 

Blackberries,  376,  416 

Blairgowrie,  415 

Blue-grass  region,  203 

Blue  Ridge  country,  385 

Boca  del  Toro,  169 

Boers,  209,  233,  235 

Boiled  water,  498,  499 

Bombay,  mustard,  516 

Borneo,  588 

Boston,  Mass.,  as  a  fish  market, 
335;  whale  meat,  341 

Bowman,  Isaiah,  608 

Bran,  49 

Brazil,  cattle,  232;  cattle  resources, 
236;  coffee  growing,  488,  489, 
493;  population,  591;  rice,  101, 
105;  sugar  industry,  471 

Bread,  acorn,  561;  cottonseed,  318; 
fish,  333;  grain  and  alfalfa,  242; 
peanut,  365;  potatoes  as  substi- 
tute, 157;  rye,  74;  soy  bean,  363; 
tropical  substitutes,  158;  various 
materials  for,  67,  69;  West 
Point,  75;  wheat-bread  eating, 
14 

Bread-riots,  12 

Breakfast  foods,   111 

Breeding,  536,  539 

British  Columbia,  431 

British  Guiana,  rice  growing,  101 ; 
sugar  industry,  470 

British  North   Borneo,  588 

Brittany,  339 

Brussels  sugar  conference,  463 

Buckwheat,  qualities,  84 

Buenos  Aires,  402 

Buffalo  grass,  191 

Buffaloes.     See  Bison 

Bulgaria,   404 

Burbank,  Luther,  536 

Burbon  tea,  504 

Burma,  rice  production,  98,  99, 
100 

Bushman  tea,  504 

Butter,  247;  cold  storage  on  hand, 
264;  Danish,  252,  261;  Dutch,' 
260;  Ireland  and  France,  259; 
manufacture,  253;  soy  bean  sub- 
stitute, 363;  substitutes,  315 

Buttermilk,  247 


Cabbage,    412,    432;    United    States 

acreage,  373 
Cacao,  climatic  requirements,  506; 


markets.  510;  method  of  prepara- 
tion, 509 ;  Old-World  growing, 
509;  origin  and  production,  505; 
use  as  food,  50!) 

Cacao  tree,  505;  fruit,  507;  wind 
and,  506,  507 

Caladium,  162 

California,  587;  apple  growing, 
387;  barley,  82;  canning  indus- 
try, 412;  change  in  exports,  50; 
date  culture,  425;  dried  fruit  in- 
dustry, 418,  419;  fig  industry, 
422;  grape  growing,  444,  450; 
irrigation  for  fruit  trees,  440; 
lemons,  441 ;  mustard  growing, 
515;  olive  growing,  317;  orange 
growing,  439;  peach  growing, 
401;  potato  experience,  148;  rai- 
sins, 420;  rice  area,  104;  vegeta- 
ble industry,  374;  wheat  crop, 
26 

Calories,  241,  242 

Camden,  N.  J.,  414 

Camels,  213 

Canada,  apple  growing,  390;  corn 
growing,  117;  dairying,  257;  fish- 
eries, 336;  free  land,  38;  June 
sunshine  and  what  may  be  ex- 
pected in  wheat  growing,  57; 
lobsters,  346;  oat  acreage,  80; 
poultry  and  eggs,  307;  resources, 
524;  transportation  for  wheat, 
47;  wheat  area,  58;  wheat  ex- 
ports, 51;  wheat  production,  36; 
wheat  resources,  53 

Canada  thistle,  357 

Canary  Islands,  banana  cultivation, 
107 

Cane  sugar.     See  under  Sugar 

Canning,  corn,  411;  extent  of  in- 
dustry, 408;  fish,  332;  fruits  and 
vegetables,  406;  meat,  224;  mili- 
tary value,  408 ;  Pacific  coast, 
412;  process  and  its  service,  406; 
salmon,  342;  United  States  in- 
dustry, 409 

Cantaloupes,   413 

Carabao.     See  Water  buffalo 

Carbohydrates,  453;  future  supply, 
172 

Caribbean  countries,  bananas,  168 

Carob  bean,  551 

Carob  tree,  359 

Carp,  351 

Caspian  Sea,  342 

Cassava,  159;  marketing  in  Haiti, 
160;  possibilities,  161 

Cassia,  513 


620 


INDEX 


Castor  oil,  328 

Cats,  68,  200 

Cattle,  Argentina,  Uruguay,  and 
Chile,  231;  Asia,  southeastern, 
233;  breeds,  247;  dairy,  247; 
dairy,  improvement,  268;  distri- 
bution, 216;  distribution  in  vari- 
ous countries,  228;  European  in- 
dustry, 227 ;  export  products, 
216;  freezing  and  starving,  229; 
India,  97;  irrigation  and,  222; 
leading  countries,  219;  migra- 
tion and  shipment,  222;  Old 
World  arid  belt,  228;  shipment 
of  live  cattle,  223;  south  tem- 
perate zone,  229;  Texas  long- 
horned,  218;  tropic  America  and 
tropic  Africa,  232;  -United 
States,  per  square  mile  and  per 
hundred  inhabitants,  221 ;  United 
Sates  distribution,  223;  United 
States  range,  218;  world  num- 
ber, 217;  see  also  Animals,  do- 
mestic 

Cattle  tick,  236,  238,  239 

Caviar,  342 

Cayenne  pepper,  512 

Cayuses,  203 

Centolla,  351 

Cereal  breakfast  foods,  49 

Cereals,  importance,  14;  minor,  of 
the  temperate  zone,  67 ;  minor, 
resemblance  to  wheat,  70 

Ceylon,  cacao  industry,  509;  cin- 
chona industry,  538;  cinnamon, 
513;  coffee  industry,  490;  rice 
acreage,  99 ;  rice  growing,  94,  95 ; 
tea  growing,  501 

Champagne,  446 

Chapman,  Mr.,  350 

Charleston,  S.  C.,  tea  growing, 
503 

Charlotte,  N.  C.,  318 

Cheese,  247;  camembert,  260; 
Canadian  and  American,  258; 
cottage,  246;  Dutch,  260;  Euro- 
pean demand,  259;  from  sheep's 
milk,  249;  Italian,  263;  manu- 
facture, 253;  Nsufchatel,  262; 
Roquefort,  260;  "Yankee,"  258 

Chemistry,  527 

Cherokees,  503 

Cherries,  404 

Chesapeake  Bay,  330,  344,  346; 
peach  industry,  399 

Chestnut  trees  in  Corsica,  546 

Chestnuts,  560 

Chewing  gum,  596 


Chicago,  meat  industry,  224;  pack- 
ing industry  branches,  231 

Chick  peas,  359 

Chickens,  311;  see  also  Eggs;  Poul- 
try 

Chile,  apple  growing,  394;  cattle, 
231;  dried  fruits,  425;  peach 
growing,  403;  sheep,  282 

Chilean  nitrate,  60;  see  also  Ni- 
trates 

Chillies,  512 

Chilliwack,  431 

China,  612;  agricultural  methods, 
520;  apple  growing,  393;  corn 
production,  128;  drying  food, 
581;  function  of  vegetables,  375; 
mules,  207;  natural  protection, 
600;  pork  exports,  234;  potatoes, 
141;  poultry  and  eggs,  308;  re- 
sources, 525;  rice  cultivation,  95, 
96,  98;  soy  beans,  360;  swine, 
303,  304;  tea  cultivation,  498; 
wheat  growing,  45;  wheat  har- 
vesting, 32 

Chincha  Islands,  350 

Chinese,  land  hunger,  610 

Chinese  coolies,  512 

Chittenden  diet,   186 

Chocolate,  confusion  of  names,  505; 
factories,  509 

Cinchona  industry,  537 

Cinnamon,  513 

Cities,  ideal  plan,  574;  making 
over,  573;  tropic  location,  592, 
593 

Citrous  fruits,  commercial  advan- 
tages, 433 

Civilizations,  600 

Clams,  345,  348 

Cliff  dwellers,  600 

Climate,  dependable,  60;  effect 
on  man,  584,  585;  location  of 
homes  with  regard  to,  584; 
Mediterranean,  24 

Clover,  192,  300,  357,  370,  523 

Cloves,  514 

Coal,   531 

Coal  tar,  527,  528 

Cobb,  Irvin  S.,  176 

Coca  tree,  505 

Cocaine,  505 

Cochin-China,  rice  production,  98, 
99,  100,  105 

Coco  palm,  505 

Cocoa,  as  a  food,  510;  confusion  of 
names,  505 

Coconut  butter,  323 

Coconut  oil,  319 


INDEX 


621 


Coconut  palm,  319,  321 

Coconuts,  318,  505;  opening  for 
copra,  320;  plantations,  322,  324 

Coddling  moth,  386 

Codfish,  in  Massachusetts  Senate, 
334;  value,  335 

Coffee,  487;  Africa,  496;  Arabian, 
489;  coffee  tree  and  climate,  487; 
growth  and  preparation,  489 ;  his- 
tory, 488;  India,  Ceylon,  etc., 
490;  Mocha,  489;  price  fluctua- 
tions, 494,  495;  Spanish  America, 
491;  substitutes,  497 

Cold  storage.     See  Refrigeration 

Cold  waves,  oranges  in  the  United 
States  and,  437 

Coleman,  G.  A.,  485 

Collingwood,   H.  W.,  567 

Colombia,  coffee  growing,  492 

Columbus,  Christopher,  158,  511 

Commerce.     See  Trade 

Concord  grapes,  447,  449,  450 

Concrete  ships,   532 

Congo,  banana  crop,  164;  cassava, 
160;  rice  crop,  105 

Congo  River,  532 

Congress,  Ueited  States,  220 

Connecticut,  514;  peach  growing, 
400 

Conquerors,  599 

Conti,  Ginori,  532 

Cooke,  O.  F-,  559 

Cooking,  bad  and  good,  174,  176 

Cooling  tropic  dwelling  house,  595 

Co-operation  in  fruit  growing  in 
California,  441 

Co-operative  association,  Denmark, 
305;  potato  growers,  150 

Co-operative  pork-packing  societies, 
301,  302 

Copra,  319,  321;  preparation,  322 

Coral   limestone,  474 

Cordoba,  Argentina,  230 

Cork  forests,  298  . 

Corn,  522;  as  food,  110;  Asia,  128; 
aversion  to,  67 ;  Black  Sea  Basin, 
124;  canning,  119,  411;  climatic 
requirements,  112;  corn-belt's 
other  products,  117;  cross-section 
of  grain,  108;  date  when  plant- 
ing begins,  118;  exports,  Amer- 
ican, 121;  future  of  supply,  130; 
heat  and  growth  in  Pennsyl- 
vania, 114;  hogging-down,  302, 
303;  improved  kinds,  537;  im- 
provement and  extension  of 
growing,  117;  in  the  cotton-belt, 
119;  in  tropical  America  and 


Mexico,  123;  July  rain  and  yield, 
112;  Mediterranean  and  adjacent 
regions,  production,  126;  Paranfi 
Valley,  128;  prices,  122;  produc- 
tion, total  and  per  capita,  131; 
scattered  places  of  production, 
130;  United  States  corn-belt,  116; 
United  States  exports,  1912-18, 
11;  United  States  leadership, 
130;  United  States  production, 
115;  usefulness  in  rough  coun- 
tries, 109;  value  to  the  settlers 
and  people  of  America,  107; 
world  acreage,  125 

Corn  bread,  121,  122,  123 

Corn  clubs,  120 

Corn  meal,  176,  366 

Corn-meal  mush,  110 

Corn  oil,  111 

Corn-starch,  111,  172 

Corn  substitutes,  132 

Corn  syrup,  111,  485 

Corsica,   chestnut  orchards,   546 

Cossacks,  203 

Cost  of  living,  611 

Costa  Rica,  banana  plantation,  165; 
coconuts,  324 ;  coffee  growing,  492 

Cotswold  Hills,  276 

Cottage  cheese,  246 

Cotton,  239,  317,  318 

Cottonseed,  317 

Cottonseed  bread,  318 

Cottonseed  oil,  317 

County  farm  demonstration  service, 
120 

Cowpeas,  523 

Cows,  216,  246;  Holstein  "Tilly," 
245;  milch  cows  in  the  United 
States  in  1912  by  states,  256; 
taming,  199 

Crab,  canned,  332 

Crab  meat,  338 

Cradle,  wheat,  30 

Crookes,  Sir  William,  52,  69 

Cropped  land,  leading  countries, 
177 

Crops,  double  cropping,  522;  food 
per  acre,  various  crops,  182;  na- 
tional comparisons  in  1911-13, 
175 

Crustacea,  354 

Cuba,  374,  590;  grape-fruit,  442; 
orange  growing,  442;  sugar  cane, 
468,  469;  sugar  industry,  473 

Cucumbers,  375 

Curacao,  435 

Curry,  91 

Cyanamide,  60 


622 


INDEX 


D 


Dairy  cattle,  247 

Dairy  products,  240;  Argentina, 
265;  Australasia  and  refrigera- 
tion, 264;  characteristics  and 
location,  249 ;  exports,  develop- 
ing, 258;  improvements  in  manu- 
facture, 25~3 ;  international  trade, 
258;  northwestern  Europe,  259; 
possible  extension  of  areas  and 
industry,  265;  prospective  supply, 
269;  United  States  and  Switzer- 
land exports,  263;  United  States 
exports,  251 

Dairying,  247 ;  European  intensity, 
262;  intensive  agriculture  and, 
254;  winter,  importance,  64 

Dakotas,  29;  apple  trees,  380; 
wheat  yield  and  temperature,  17 

Danube  Valley,  corn  growing,  124 

Dashcen,   162 

Dates,  422;  United  States,  introduc- 
tion into,  424 

Dehydrated  vegetables,  426,  430 

Delaware,  canning  industry,  410; 
peach  growing,  399 

Delaware  River,  578 

Deltas,  90,  98,  374 

Democracy,  601 

Denmark,  animals,  178;  butter,  261; 
eggs  and  poultry,  305;  margarine, 
316;  swine,  301 

Dependence,   7 

Detroit,  sources  of  milk  supply,  250 

Devil-fish,  333 

Dhurra,    136,  490 

Diet,  bread-potato-fruit,  186;  Chit- 
tenden,  186;  man's  original,  366; 
orthodoxy  in,  67 ;  potatoes  and 
milk,  154;  strange,  67,  68;  vege- 
tarian, 242 

Dismal   Swamp,   151 

Distribution,  566 

Distribution  of  men,  573 

Dogfish,   330 

Dogs,  200;  as  draft  animals,  210; 
Saxony,  211;  sheep  and,  288 

Doldrums,  507 

Dominica,  443 

Donkeys,  distribution,  206;  value, 
206 

Double  cropping,  522 

Draft  animals.     See  Animals,  draft 

Drainage,  524 

Dried  potatoes,   146 

Droughts,  pastern  United  States,  27 

Dry  farming,  551 


Drying,  food,  581;  fruits  and  veg- 
etables, 417 

Ducks,   310,   347 

Durum  wheat,  58 

Dutch   in  Java,  589 

Dutch  steamers  in  New  York  har- 
bor, 180 


E 


East  Indies,  coffee  industry,  490 

"  Eastern   Shore,"   372 

Echart,  F.  E.,  482 

Ecuador,  cacao  production,  508; 
coffee  growing,  492;  corn  yield, 
123 

Eden,  559 

Edison,  Thomas  A.,  536 

Eggs,  173;  China,  308;  commerce, 
306;  Denmark,  304,  305;  Europe, 
308,  309  ;  food  value,  307  ;  market- 
ing improvement,  309;  packing, 
310;  United  States  industry,  307, 
310 

Egypt,  fertility,  529;  rice  growing, 
100;  sugar  industry,  447 

Electric  power,  583 

Electricity,  in  farming,  534;  plant 
growth  by,  534 

Elephant's  ear,   162 

Elephants,  213 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  67 

England,  cattle,  227,  228;  jams, 
409;  prosperity,  611;  superior 
climate  for  wheat,  60,  61;  wheat 
growing,  41 

English  walnut,  543,  556 

Erie  Canal,  47,  48 

Erosion,  563,   564 

Eucalyptus,  504 

Europe,  apple  growing,  391 ;  as 
wheat-growing  continent,  38; 
cattle  industry,  227;  commerce 
in  vegetables,  367;  corn  eating, 
121 ;  dairying  in  northwestern, 
259;  egg  industry,  308,  309; 
fisheries,  337 ;  fisheries,  early  im- 
portance, 335;  food  from  the 
south  temperate  zone,  230;  grape 
growing,  447 ;  hay  crop,  197,  198 ; 
horses,  202;  oat  acreage,  76; 
potato  acreage,  144;  potatoes, 
141;  poultry,  309;  rice  region, 
101;  rye  acreage,  72;  sheep  rais- 
ing, 288,  289;  sugar-beet  acreage, 
459;  swine,  300,  301;  wheat  ex- 
porters, 44;  wheat  regions,  28; 
wheat  yield,  40;  wheat  zone,  41 


INDEX 


623 


Exports,  American  decline,  10;  pork 
and  corn,  etc.,  from  the  United 
States  in  1912-18,  11;  wheat,  47, 
49,  50;  wheat  and  beef  from  the 
United  States  in  1912-18,  9 

Eye  troubles,  242,  243 


Fairchild,  David,  68,  69,  147,  159, 
426,  452 

Falkland  Islands,  sheep,  277 

Fallowing,  summer,  wheat  crops 
and,  65 

Famines,  corn  for  famine  sufferers, 
111;  deaths  in  India,  589;  effect 
of  empty  stomach,  3,  10;  England, 
6;  India,  519;  possibilities,  3,  4 

Farn*  tractor.    See  Tractors 

Fanning,  electricity  for  power,  534; 
Massachusetts,  1786,  4,  7 

Farms,  abandoned,  39;  population 
living  on,  582 

Fats,  596;  edible,  314;  value,  314 

Fawcett,  W.,  163 

Fertility,  new  resources  of,  535 

Fertilizers,  106;  by-products  of 
packing  industry,  226;  chemical, 
528,  529;  China,  375;  fish,  339; 
for  apple  trees,  392,  393;  sugar 
cane,  483;  ultimate  resources, 
529;  see  also  Nitrates;  Ammonia 

Figs,  421 

Fiji  Islands,  cane-sugar  industry, 
480 

Finch  (V.  C.)  and  Baker  (O.  E.), 
5,  82,  passim 

Finger  Lake  District,  vineyards,  449 

Fish,  canning  and  refrigeration, 
332;  carnivorous,  329;  culture, 
351;  future  supply,  348;  good 
eating,  332,  333;  hatcheries,  352; 
in  commerce,  347;  industry,  331; 
over  supply,  332;  prejudice 
against,  329 ;  rays  and  skates, 
333;  refrigeration,  349;  Southern 
States,  604;  ultimate  resources, 
539 

Fisher,  Irving,  366 

Fisheries,  European,  337 

Fisheries,  Japan,  338;  locating 
factor,  334;  new  methods  of 
catching  fish,  349;  northeastern 
North  America,  334;  open  sea, 
339;  shore  and  river,  342 

Flail,  30 

Florida,,  comparison  with  Sicily, 
442;  Havana  competition,  374; 


orange  growing,  437;  oranges, 
434;  potatoes,  150;  truck  farms, 
372,  373 

Flour,  exports,  50 

Flour  mills,  49 

Flower  industry,  368 

Food,  distance  classification,  581; 
far-reaching  sources  of  daily 
meals,  7;  habits,  452,  453;  na- 
tional, world  crop  comparisons  in 
1911-13,  175;  possibilities,  69; 
references  in  prayers,  158;  values, 
176,  615,  616;  various  crops,  per 
acre,  182;  waste,  566,  570;  see 
also  Diet 

Food  Administration,  568 

Food  experts,  242 

Food  standardizing  plant,  569 

Food  supply,  general  question  of 
future,  517 

Forage,  188;  Europe,  194 

Formosa,  tea  growing,  500 

Fort  Scott,  Kansas,  485 

Fowls.     See  Poultry 

France,  cattle,  227,  228;  corn  pro- 
duction, 126;  flower  and  vegetable 
industry,  367,  368;  potato  crop, 
143;  rabbits,  312;  view  of  small 
fields,  184;  walnut  trees  and 
wheat,  556;  wheat  growing,  43; 
wines,  446 

Free  trade,  611,  613 

Freezing  and  thawing  injurious  to 
wheat,  21 

French  Revolution,  12 

Fresno,  Cal.,  420 

Frost,  Florida  oranges,  438 ;  orchard 
protection,  388;  peach  trees  and, 
398,  399 

Fruit  growing,  377;  citrous  trees  in 
Arizona,  440;  co-operation,  441; 
importance  of  islands,  435;  west- 
ern United  States,  387,  401 

Fruit  honey,  486 

Fruits,  dried  fruit  industry  in  Cali- 
fornia, 418,  419;  drying,  417; 
overproduction,  412;  possibilities 
of  increase,  414;  small,  376;  see 
also  Citrous  fruits 

Fungi,  vineyards,  444;  Virginia 
grapevines,  449 


G 


Ganges  Valley,  98 

Garden  City,  574 

Garden   City  Association,  575 

Garden  products,  355 


624 


INDEX 


Gardens.     See  Vegetables 

Gas,  531 

Geese,  310 

Georgia,  corn  production,  120;  food 
and  land,  607;  peach  growing, 
400;  persimmon  tree,  550;  pork 
and  pecans,  558;  rice  growing, 
102 

Germany,  beet  crop,  461 ;  cattle, 
227,  228;  cattle  breeding,  268; 
dried  potatoes,  146;  horses,  202; 
leading  crops,  460;  plan  for 
world  dominion,  8 ;  potash,  530 ; 
potato  crops,  144,  146,  155;  pota- 
toes for  alcohol,  145;  sugar  beets, 
457;  swine,  302 

Ginger,  513 

Gloucester,  Mass.,  334,  335 

Glucose,  172,  485 

Goats,  220,  292;  leading  countries, 
293;  milk  from,  249 

Goodrich,  Chauncey  E.,  139 

Gothenburg,  356 

Government,  601 

Grains,  542,  553;  machinery  for 
harvesting  small  grains,  33; 
swine  and,  298,  303;  see  also 
Cereals 

Granada,  514 

Grape-fruit,  American  market,  443; 
Cuban,  442 

Grape  juice,  486 

Grapes,  433;  American  kinds,  447; 
hillside  growing  in  Europe,  447 ; 
history,  443;  industry,  445; 
limits  of  growing,  445;  market- 
ing methods,  451 ;  style  in,  447 ; 
United  States,  448;  see  also  Wine 

Grass,    189,    192 

Grass  fires,  Arab  punishment  for 
starters,  191 

Great  Britain,  cane  sugar  imports, 
456;  food  importation,  224;  meat 
and  men,  179;  sheep  industry, 
290;  tea  habit,  498;  wheat  pro- 
duction, 39 

Great  Lakes,  342;  peach  growing, 
398 

Great  Plains,  53,  190,  587 ;  as  cattle 
range,  218;  intensive  agriculture, 
254 ;  wheat  region,  26 

Great  Slave  Lake,  218 

Green  corn,  111 

Greens,  366,  432;  see  also  Vege- 
tables 

Guacho,   183 

Guano,  351,  528 

Guano  Islands,  350 


Gautemala,  coffee  growing,  492 
Guiana.     See  British  Guiana 
Gulf     Coast,     cassava    possibilities, 
161;   rice  area,  104;   rice  produc- 
tion,  102 
Gullies,  563 
Gutta  joolatong,  596 


H 


Haggard,  H.  Rider,  304 

Haiti,  594;  cassava  cakes  and  sweet- 
meats, 160,  161;  coffee  industry, 
492;  rice  as  food,  91;  sugar  in- 
dustry, 472 

Hake,  335 

Halibut,   335 

Ham,   174 

Hammonton,   N.   J.,   416 

Hand  agriculture,  597 

Hankow,   500 

Hares,  312 

Harper,  R.  M.,  504 

Harput,  229 

"Hasty  Pudding  Club,"  110 

Havana,  374 

Havre,  497 

Hawaii,  algaroba,  554;  banana  flour, 
170;  canned  pineapple,  408,  409; 
fish,  350 ;  fish  canning,  349 ;  grow- 
ing one's  own  food,  568 ;  improved 
process  of  sugar-cane  growing, 
482;  sugar  industry,  474 

Hawks,  Sir  John,  430 

Hay,  alfalfa  harvesting,  191,  194; 
city  dwellers  and,  190;  cultivated, 
192;  distribution  and  place  of  the 
industry,  192;  Europe,  impor- 
tance, 197;  European  acreage,  198; 
importance  of  crop,  192;  in  com- 
merce, 194;  in  irrigated  countries, 
196;  industry,  189;  methods  of 
making,  193;  natural,  190;  pas- 
turing animals  and,  190;  per- 
centage of  total  crop  area, 
193 

Heated  rooms  and  cooled  rooms, 
595 

Hens,  305;  breeds,  311;  egg-laying, 
311;  see  also  Eggs;  Poultry 

Heredity,  536 

Herring,  334,  336,  337,  339,  346, 
351,  604;  value,  343 

Hertfordshire,  575 

Hevea,  538 

Hickory  tree,  543 

Hides,  216,  232 

Himalayas,  501,  538,  602 


INDEX 


625 


Hog  cholera,  303,  304 

Hogging-down,  302,  303 

Hogs.    See  Swine 

Holland,  dairy  products,  260;  fish- 
eries, 334,  337;  meat  and  men, 
179,  180;  prosperity,  611;  wheat 
crop,  43 

Holly  plant,  503 

Homes,  cooling  in  the  tropics,  595; 
location  as  regards  climate,  584; 
location  as  to  accessibility,  582, 
583 

Homestead  law,  219 

Honey,  452,  454,  485;  fruit,  486 

Honey  locust,  550 

Honolulu,  banana  flour,  170 

Hood   River  Valley,  387 

Hoover,  H.  C.,  253 

Hops,  United  States  acreage,  135 

Horses,  Arabian,  201;  breeds  and 
growing  in  Europe,  202;  do- 
mestication, 199;  foreign  trade, 
204;  three  types,  201;  United 
States  industry,  201,  203;  useful- 
ness, 200;  wild,  203 

Howard,  Ebenezer,  574 

Hungary,  corn  production,  124,  126; 
swine,  301 

Hunger,  trade,  and  war,  599;  see 
also  Famine 

Huntington,  Ellsworth,  584,  585 

Hurricanes  and  banana  crop,  169 

Hutchinson,  Robert,  170 


Iceland,  cattle,  222;  hay  crop,  198; 
sheep,  278 

Idaho,  54;  apple  growing,  387; 
eastern,  33 

Ifugaos,  94 

Illinois,  bran  and  alfalfa  for  feed- 
ing cows,  197;  corn,  116,  117,  126 

Immigrants,  desire  for,  526 

Imperial  Valley,  267 ;  cantaloupes, 
413;  date  culture,  425 

India,  cattle,  97,  233;  coffee  in- 
dustry, 400;  corn  production, 
128;  dea the.  from  famine,  589; 
draft  animals,  200;  food  limit, 
519;  foods,  89;  oxen,  210;  rice 
acreage,  99;  rice  growing,  98; 
sorghum  and  millet  acreage,  173; 
sugar  cane,  470;  tea  growing, 
501;  wheat,  21;  wheat  crops  and 
exports,  45 

Indian  corn.    See  Corn 

Indian  ponies,  203 


Indians,  American,  188;  acorns  as 
food,  561;  corn  and,  107,  109 

Indigo,  527,  528 

Individualism,  573 

Industrial  alcohol,  48 

Industry,  new  resources  in,  535 

Information  service,  571 

Iowa,  219,  583;  livestock,  179; 
swine,  296,  300 

Ireland,  egg  marketing,  309;  meat 
and  men,  180;  potato  blight  of 
1846,  140;  potato  eating,  68; 
wheat,  41 

Irrigation,  California  fruit  trees, 
440;  cattle  industry  and,  222; 
citrous  fruit  trees  in  Arizona, 
440;  dried  fruits  and,  425;  Gulf 
coast  for  rice  growing,  103;  Jap- 
anese foot  wheel,  96;  rice  cultiva- 
tion in  the  Orient,  94,  95,  96; 
Spain,  518;  sugar  beets  and,  465; 
tropic  agriculture,  595;  western 
apple  orchards,  38 

Islands,,  importance  in  fruit  grow- 
ing, 435 

Isolation,  612 

Italy,  agriculture,  521;  cattle,  228; 
oranges  and  lemons,  436;  pulse 
plants,  359;  vineyards,  445,  448; 
wheat  crop,  44 


Jam,  409;   Scotland,  415 

Jamaica,  594;  banana  crop,  164; 
bananas  as  a  money  crop,  169; 
cassava,  161 ;  coffee  industry, 
492;  oranges,  434;  pimento,  515; 
population,  592;  yams,  159 

Janesville,  Wis.,  411 

Japan,  607;  barley,  83;  beri-beri 
and  rice,  92;  fisheries,  332,  338; 
irrigation  by  foot  wheel,  96; 
population  and  animals,  178; 
resources  fully  developed,  520, 
521 ;  rice  importing  and  export- 
ing, 100;  rice  yield,  94;  sweet 
potatoes,  159;  tea  culture,  500, 
504;  vegetables,  function,  375; 
wheat  crop,  46 

Japanese  land  hunger,  610 

Java,  589;  cacao  industry,  509; 
cinchona  industry,  538;  coffee  in- 
dustry, 490;  millet  and  sorghum, 
137;  rice  growing,  95,  105;  sugar 
growing,  475,  tea  growing,  503 

Jefferson,  Thomas,  385 

Jerked  beef,  231 


626 


INDEX 


Johannesburger  wine,  448 
Johnson,  Alvin,  587 
Johnson,  Dr.,  75 
Jones,  R.  E.,  245,  246 

K 

Kafir    corn,     132,    133,     137,    537; 

United  States  acreage,  135 
Kalahari  Desert,  272 
Kamaboka,  348 
Kamchatka,  338 
Kansas,    corn,    116,    117;    intensive 

agriculture,   254 
Kaoliang,  137 
Karo,   111,  485 
Kellogg,  J.  H.,  360 
Kentucky,  horses,  203 
Kerensky,  12 
Kieffer  pear,  405 
King,  F.  H.,  45,  308,  520 
Kirghiz,  248 
Konigsberg,  515 
Korea,  soy  beans,  363 ;  unused  lands, 

525 
Kurds,  229 


Lablab  pea,  360 

Labrador,  dependence  on  fish,  336 

Lacto-vegetarianism,  184 

Lake  dwellers,  136,  379,  444 

Lancaster,  Pa.,  222 

Land,  free,  38,  526;  hunger  for,  603, 
608,  609;  ultimate  uses,  565 

Lard,  300,  316 

Latin  America,  corn,  123 

Laughlin,  J.  Lawrence,  146 

Leeton,  N.  S   W.,  409 

Legumes,  356,  523,  550 

Lemon  grass,  504 

Lemons,  California,  441;  Sicily, 
436 

Letchworth,  England,  574 

Lexington,  Ky.,  203 

Liege,  distribution  of  workers,  580 

Lime,  240 

Limes,    443 

Liverpool,  plant  growth  experiment, 
534 

Llamas,  200,  212 

Lobsters,  346,  348 

Locust,  359 

Locust  tree,  550 

Lompoc,  515 

Louisiana,  corn  growing,  114;  plant- 
ing sugar  cane,  478;  rice,  102; 


rice  growing,  94 ;  rice  plant,  87 ; 
sugar  cane,  468,  469 
Lusk,  Graham,   138,   174,   186,    187, 
240,  315,  486 

M 

McCollum,  E.  V.,  110,  184,  242,  243 

McCormick,  Cyrus,  30 

Mace,  513 

Machete,    597 

Machinery,      in      coffee      growing, 

489 ;    in   dairy  products,   253 ;    in 

haying,   193;    in  milking,  266;   in 

rice     cultivation,     103,     105;     in 

wheat  production,  30 
Mackerel,  339 
Madeira    Islands,    banana    culture, 

167;    vineyards,    444 
Madura,   590 
Magdeburg,  461 
Maine,     potatoes,     150,     152,     153; 

sardine  canners,   340 
Maize.     See  Corn 

Majorca,  two-story  agriculture,  554 
Malaga,  447 
Malay    Peninsula,    coffee    growing, 

496 
Manchuria,    54;    millet,    135,    136; 

soy  beans,  327,  363 ;  unused  lands, 

525 ;  wheat  crop,  46 
Manchurian  ponies,  200 
Mango,  596 
Mangum  terrace,  564 
Mannheim,  319 

Manufacturing,    586;    exacting    de- 
mands,   606 
Maple  sugar,  483 
Margarine.     See  Oleomargarine 
Market,    distant,    571;    home,    570; 

local,  organizing,  566 
Market  gardens,  369 
Markham,  Clements,  538 
Marmalade,  orange,  435 
Maryland,    canning    industry,    410; 

peach  growing,  339 
Massachusetts,    4,    7,    8;     fisheries, 

335,   336;   tree  crops,  549 
Mast,  297 
Matabeleland,  235 
Mat6,  504 

Mauritius,  514;  sugar  industry,  447 
Mayor,  Alfred  G.,  354 
Mazatlan,  350 
Mazola,   111 
Mazzard,  404 
Meat,  as  an  appetizer,  174;  chilled 

and  frozen,  shipping,  224;  coming 


INDEX 


627 


scarcity,  173;  effect  of  improved 
methods  of  shipping,  224;  effi- 
ciency from,  243;  extra  heat 
production,  187;  future  supply 
and  price,  234;  marketing  im- 
provements, 223;  men,  land,  and, 
173;  resources  and  price,  future, 
239;  unessential  in  diet,  185,  239; 
wastefulness  of  production,  184; 
way  out  of  shortage,  186 

Meat-packing  industry,  225; 
branches  of  Chicago  firms  in 
South  America,  231;  control  of 
products,  226 

Meat  trust,  226,  302 

Mediterranean  climate,  24,  145,  228, 
290,  316,  317,  417 

Mediterranean  countries,  cherries, 
405;  corn  production,  126;  orange 
growing,  435;  pulse  plants,  359; 
swine,  298;  tree  crops,  559 

Mendel  ism,  55,  56 

Menhaden,  339 

Merriam,  C.  H.,  561 

Mesopotamia,  127,  424;  resources, 
525 

Mesquite,  554 

Mexico,  coffee  industry,  491 ;  corn, 
123 

Meyer,  Frank,  551 

Michigan,  apple  growing,  383; 
peach  growing,  298 

Mildura,  425 

Milk,  business,  244;  city  supplies, 
249;  condensed,  252;  condensing 
and  preserving,  251 ;  contents  of  a 
bottle,  241;  cooling,  252,  253; 
danger,  247;  derivatives,  246; 
evaporated,  251;  food  value,  245; 
importance,  186;  increase  pos- 
sible, 266;  necessity,  240;  New 
York  City,  249;  potatoes  and,  as 
a  diet,  154;  shipment  in  cooled 
car,  252;  skim  milk,  300,  301; 
source  of  energy,  244;  sources, 
247 

Milk-chocolate,  262 

Millet,  133;  Asia,  135;  United 
States  acreage,  136 

Milling  of  wheat,  29 

Milo  maize,  137;  United  States 
acreage,  135 

Minneapolis,  flour  mills,  49 

Minnesota,  29,  267 ;  potatoes,  149 

Mississippi  Valley,  apple  growing, 
385;  corn-belt,  116;  new  varieties 
of  alfalfa,  197;  vegetable  in- 
dustry, 374 


Missouri,  apple  growing,  386;  as  a 
wheat  region,  42;  mules,  208 

Mocha  coffee,  489 

Molasses,  479,  481 

Molassquite,  48 1 

Mollusks,  354,  540 

Mongolia,  610 

Monsoons,  87,  88,  589 

Montana,  wheat  region,  28 

Montserrat,  443 

Moonshiners,  109 

Moore,  H.  F.,  333 

Morris,  Robert  T.,  313,  353 

Mosquito,  524 

Motor  trucks,  190;  use  in  food- 
supply,  581 

Mowing  machine,  193 

Muir,  John,  561 

Mules,  distribution,  206;  United 
States  industry,  208;  value,  206 

Musquash    (muskrat),  313 

Mustard,  511,  515 

Mutton,  future  supply,  293;  sup- 
ply, 270 


N 


Nansen,  Fridtjof,  407 
Nantucket,  340 
Napoleonic  wars,  456 
Natal,  orange  growers,  443 
Nebraska,  alfalfa  feeding,  197;  rye 

production,    74;    wheat,    22 
Nevada,  wild  almonds,  551 
Nevada  Indians,  561 
New  Bedford,  340 
New  England,  107,  583 ;  agriculture, 

548,     549;     fisheries,     334,     335; 

forage  beets,  287;  hay  crop,  195; 

peach     growing,     400;      potatoes, 

140;   sheep  raising,  287 
New    Jersey,    garden    crops,     370; 

ideal   truck    land,   572;    potatoes, 

150 
New    South    Wales,    canning,    409; 

refrigeration  of  fish,  332;    sheep, 

281 
New    York     (City),    canned    goods, 

409;     milk     for,     249;     supplies, 

572 
New  York    (State),  apple  growing, 

382;  canning  industry,  411;  dairy 

industry,    250,    251,    264;    peach 

growing,  398 
New   Zealand,   apple   growing,   394; 

butter   and    cheese   exports,    264 ; 

dried  milk,  269;    sheep  industry, 

281 ;   wheat  yield,  24 


628 


INDEX 


Newfoundland,  332;   dependence  on 

fish,  336 

Newfoundland  banks,  334 
Niagara  Falls,  apple  district,  390 
Niagara  grapes,  447,  449,  450 
Nigeria,  327 
Nitrates,  60,  106,  528 
Nitrogen,  357,  528,  531 
Norfolk,  Va.,  371 
North    Carolina,    corn    production, 

120,  121 ;   soy  beans,  326 
North  Dakota,  dairying,  257 ;  wheat, 

26;  wheat  yield,  43 
North  Sea,  fisheries,  337 
Norway,  fisheries,  337 
Nova    Scotia,    apple   growing,    390; 

fisheries,   336 
Nutmegs,  513 
Nutrition,     animal,     185;      human, 

240,  243 
Nuts,  value,  559,  560 

0 

Oak,  carbohydrate  from  acorns,  562 ; 
evergreen  oak  in  Portugal,  544 

Oatmeal,  manufacture,  79;  Scot- 
land, 75 

Oats,  agricultural  value,  76;  as 
human  food,  75 ;  Canadian  acre- 
age, 80;  effect  of  light  weight  on 
export,  79 ;  European  acreage,  76 ; 
United  States  acreage,  78 

"Odium,"  444 

Odzi,  233 

Oils,  vegetable,  327 

Oleomargarine,  263,  315 

Olive  oil,  316,  318 

Olive  trees  in  Tunis,  552 

Onions,  374,  416 

Ontario,  potato  growers,  153 

Ontario,  Lake,  382,  383 

Open  winter  and  wheat,  21 

Opossum,  605 

Opportunities,  517 

Orange  juice,  443 

Orange  marmalade,  435 

Oranges,  California,  439;  Cuba, 
442;  Florida,  434,  437;  future 
supply,  441;  Jamaica,  434; 
Mediterranean  countries,  435; 
prices,  442;  United  States  grow- 
ing conditions,  437;  waste,  434 

Orchards,  378;  water  pockets,  563; 
see  also  Apples 

Orinoco,   236 

Ortava,  167 

Ostrich-farming,  312 


Overproduction,  157;  fruits  and 
vegetables,  412,  414,  415 

Oxen,  agriculture  and,  209 ;  econ- 
omy in  Portugal,  188;  rations 
represented,  183,  184;  working 
value,  209 

Oysters,  early  prejudice  against, 
330;  value,  344 

Ozark  plateau,  apple  growing,  386; 
peach  growing,  400 


Pacific  coast,  apple  growing,  387; 
canning,  412 

Pacific  Ocean,  fish,  350 

Pacifism,  600 

Packing.  See  Meat-packing  in- 
dustry 

Paddy,  97,  99 ;  fields,  95 

Palestine,  wheat,  15 

Palm  nuts,  327 

Palmona,  319 

Panama  Indian  farmer's  family, 
etc.,  597 

Paper,  bagasse,  483 

Paraguay,  cattle,  232;  cattle  re- 
sources, 236;  corn  production, 
128;  oranges,  434 

Paraguay  tea,  504 

Parana  bananas,  163 

Parana  Valley,  corn  production, 
128;  meat  production,  230;  sheep 
industry,  282 

Pasture,  189;  Europe,  197 

Patagonia,  sheep  industry,  283 

Patten,  S.  N.,  145 

Peace,   599 

Peaches,  396;  California,  401; 
Chesapeake  and  Alleghany  belts, 
399;  climate  and  crop,  397;  Euro- 
pean growing,  402;  Great  Lakes, 
398;  marketing,  402,  571;  New 
England  hills,  400;  Ozark  and 
Rocky  mountain  district,  400; 
south  temperate  zone,  402;  south- 
ern United  States  districts,  400 

Peanut  butter,  365 

Peanuts,  303,  318;  food  value,  324; 
in  commerce,  326;  plant  showing 
fruit,  357;  United  States  produc- 
tion, 325;  use,  365 

Pears,   405 

Peas,   358,  523 

Pecans,  547,  558 

Pekin,  mules,  207 

Pellagra,  110 

Penang,  514 


INDEX 


629 


Pennsylvania,  cattle  distribution, 
222;  corn  growth  as  related  to 
heat,  114;  cows,  268;  water 
pockets  in  an  apple  orchard,  563 

Peons,   123 

Pepper,   512 

Pert-heron  horses,  202 

Persia,  33,  397;  dates,  424 

Persian  walnuts,  543,  556 

Persimmon  tree,  550 

Peru,  coffee  growing,  492;  rice,  lOi; 
sugar  industry,  471 

Petrograd,  12 

Philadelphia,  Vacant  Lots  Associa- 
tion, 580 

Philippines,  cattle,  233;  copra,  324; 
Ifugaos  rice  fields,  94;  rice  ter- 
races, 95;  sugar  industry,  476; 
transplanting  rice,  88 

Phosphate,  529 

Phosphorus,  529 

Phylloxera,  446 

Pigs.     See  Swine 

Pigweed,  85 

Pilchard,  339 

Pilgrim  fathers,  107 

Pimento,  515 

Pineapples,   408,   596 

Pirates,  599 

Plankton,  edibility,  353 

Plant  growth  by  electricity,  534 

Plantains,  164 

Plants,  breeding,  536;  domestica- 
tion of  new,  537 

Plate  River  countries,  cattle  in- 
dustry, 231 

Plowing,  535 

Plowless  agriculture,  596 

Plum  butter,  404 

Plums,  403 

Po  Valley,  dairying,  263;  rice  grow- 
ing, 101 

Poi,   163 

Poland,  515 

Polenta,    111 

Ponies,  205 

Population,  606;  rural,  582;  world 
distribution,  5,  6;  see  also  Dis- 
tribution of  men 

Pork,  185,  295;  from  China,  234; 
future  supply,  303;  nuts,  fruit, 
and,  557,  558;  salt,  297,  298;  to 
the  West  Indies,  227;  United 
States  exports,  1912-18,  11;  see 
also  Swine 

Porto  Rico,  590;  banana  crop,  169; 
coffee  industry,  493;  plantains, 
164;  potatoes  for  bread,  157;  rice 


as  food,  91;  sugar  industry,  472, 
483;  vegetables  for  the  United 
States,  375 

Portugal,  corn  meal  diet,  111;  corn 
production,  127 ;  evergreen  oak 
and  acorns,  544;  taxation,  611 

Potash,  resources,  530 

Potato  flour,   141,   147,    154 

Potato  flour  factories,   154 

Potato  starch  flour,  147 

Potatoes,  acreage  of  leading  coun- 
tries, 145;  as  a  money  crop,  150; 
as  bread,  157;  breeding,  155; 
China,  141;  diet  of  milk  and,  154; 
distribution,  140;  drying,  146; 
early  beginning  of  digging,  151; 
early  supply,  150;  Europe,  141; 
European  acreage,  144;  foreign 
trade,  153;  France,  143;  Ger- 
many, 144,  146;  introduction,  68; 
Irish  famine,  140;  nativity,  139; 
nourishment,  138;  possible  in- 
crease of  crop,  138 ;  price  fluctua- 
tion, 148,  152;  regions,  best  for 
growing,  142;  Russia,  145; 
Switzerland,  145;  United  States 
centers  of  production,  149;  United 
States  production,  143,  147;  see 
also  Sweet  potatoes 

Poultry,  304;  Canada,  307;  com- 
mercial value,  306;  Europe,  309; 
United  States  production,  307 

Power,  artificial,  531;  heat  of  the 
earth's  interior  as  a  source,  533; 
sun  as  source,  533 

Prayers,  food  references  in,  158 

Prescott,  S.  C.,  170 

Prince  Edward  Island,  potato  crop, 
154 

Principe,  509 

Protein,   560 

Prunes,  404,  420 

Pteropods,  354,  540 

Pulse,  356;  importance  to  poor 
peoples,  359 ;  Mediterranean 
countries,  259 

Punnet,  R.  C.,  56 

Punta  Arenas,  351 

Pyramid  Lake,  551 


Quinine,  537 
Quinoa,  85 


Rabbits,  312 

Railroad,  misuse,  566,  572 


630 


INDEX 


Rainfall,  Americas,  June-August, 
16;  July  rain  and  corn  yield,  112; 
tea  culture  and,  503;  uncertain- 
ties, 64 ;  wheat  and,  20,  22,  23,  28 

Raisins,   419,  420,  451 

Raleigh,  Sir  Walter,  68,  139 

Rangoon,  98,  99 

Raspberries,  376;  Scotch  experi- 
ence, 415 

Rats,  313 

Rays   (fish),  333 

Razor-back  hogs,  297 

Red  River  Valley,  35;  corn,  119; 
potatoes,  154 

Reed,  W.  G.,  112 

Refrigeration,  apples,  389;  fish, 
332,  349;  meat,  224;  milk  ship- 
ment, 252 

Reina,  Felix,  164 

Reindeer,  211 

Reinsch,  P.   S.,  525 

Resources,  517;  degree  of  utiliza- 
tion, 519;  science  as  an  aid,  527; 
two  standards,  522 

Restaurants,   174 

Reunion,  477,  504,  509,  514 

Rhine   River,   vineyards,   448 

Rhodesia,  meat-freezing,  233,  235 

Rhondda,  Lord,  52,  60 

Rice,  antiquity  and  uses,  90;  Asia, 
89;  Asiatic  monsoon  and,  87; 
bran  and  straw,  92;  characteris- 
tics and  climate,  86;  European 
regions,  100,  101;  flooded  moun- 
tainside fields  of  the  Ifugaos,  94; 
future  supply,  105;  growing  by 
Asiatic  emigrants  101 ;  growing 
in  the  Orient,  92;  India  and  Cey- 
lon acreage,  99;  labor  in  growing 
and  preparing,  97 ;  laundry  starch 
172;  nitrogen  lacking  in,  360;  pol- 
ishing, 91,  92;  regions  of  growth 
and  export,  98;  soy  beans  and, 
361 ;  spread  and  extent  of  grow- 
ing, 100;  transplanting,  Philip- 
pines, 88;  United  States,  91;  Uni- 
ted States  production,  101,  102; 
varieties,  90 

Rice  pudding,  247 
Rinderpest,  233,  235 
Rio  de  Janeiro,  493,  592,  593 
River  fisheries,  342 
Roberts,  Horace,  414 

Rocky  Mountains,  apple  productiuii, 
380,  387;  peach  growing,  400; 
phosphate,  530;  sheep  285 

Roller  process  of  wheat  reduction, 
29 


Rome,  fall  of,  10 

Root  crops  for  stock,  194,  195 

Rose,  Mary  S.,  240 

Ross,  A.  B.,  567,  568,  569 

Rowntree,  B.  S.,  580 

Rubber  cultivation,  538 

Rum,  481 

Rumania,  corn  production,  124,  126; 
wheat  exports,  44 

Russia,  apricots,  421;  cattle,  228; 
corn  growing,  124;  hay  crop,  198; 
horses,  202;  potatoes,  145;  rye 
crop,  73;  threshing  floor,  34; 
wheat-belt,  28;  wheat  exports, 
44;  wheat  possibilities,  59;  wheat 
threshing,  30 

Rye,  agricultural  value,  70;  Euro- 
pean acreage,  72;  regions  of  pro- 
duction, 72;  regions  of  production 
in  the  United  States,  74;  United 
States  acreage,  73;  use  in  the 
United  States,  74 

Rye  bread,  74 


S 


Sacramento  River,  104 

Sago,  172 

Sahara,    421,    422 

Saigon,   99 

St.  Louis,  208 

St.  Thomas,  509 

Sakhalien,  338 

Salmon,  342;  canning,  342;  hatch- 
ing, 352 

Salt,   173 

Salt  meat,  174 

Salt  pork,  297,  298 

Salvador,  coffee  growing,  492 

Samoa,  509 

Samp,    110 

San  Francisco,  whale  meat,  341 

San  Jose"  scale,  377 

Sandy  soil,  crops,  369;  value,  414 

Santos,    493 

Sao  Paulo,  233,  493,  495 

Sao  Thome,  509 

Sardines,   339,   349;    American,   339 

Sauer-kraut,  411,  412 

Saunders,  Dr.,  53 

Savanger,  337 

Saxony,  fish  culture,  351 

Scidmore,  E.  R.,  135 

Science,  as  creator  of  resources,  527 

Scotland,  oatmeal,  75;  sheep,  276 

Sea,  329,  331;  free  access  to,  603; 
power  from  the  tropic,  532;  sur- 
vey of,  540;  ultimate  uses,  539 


INDEX 


631 


Sea  food,  353,  354 

Sea  trade,  6,  500 

Seasonings,  511 

Servia,  swine,  298 

Sewage,  375 

Sfax,  552,  553 

Shad,  330,  343 

Shanghai,  45 

Shantung  Province,  520;  wheat 
crop,  45 

Sharks,  as  food,  320,  348 

Shea  butter,  327 

Sheep,  220;  Africa,  292;  Argentina, 
Uruguay,  and  Chile,  282,  283; 
Australia,  279,  280;  British-bred 
wool  sheep,  275;  character,  270; 
cheese  from  milk  of,  249;  distribu- 
tion of  industry,  274;  dogs  and, 
288,  294;  Europe,  western,  288; 
factor  in  commerce,  270;  fat- 
tailed  desert,  272,  273;  in  agricul- 
ture, 272;  in  Britain,  272,  273, 
290;  Mediterranean  countries  and 
central  Eurasia,  290;  Merino. 
274;  New  Zealand,  281;  numbers 
in  various  countries,  276,  277; 
relative  importance  in  various 
countries,  278;  Scotland,  276: 
south  temperate  zone,  279;  tropic 
highlands,  291;  United  States 
eastern  farms,  286;  United  States, 
number  284 ;  value  to  regions  re- 
mote from  markets,  277 ;  wool 
sheep,  mutton  sheep,  and  refrig- 
eration, 285;  world  number,  271 

Shellfish,  344 

Shetland  pony,  205 

Shore  fisheries,  342 

Shrimp,  350 

Siam,  512;  rice  production,  98,  99, 
100 

Siberian,  dairying,  267 ;  wheat  crop, 
45,  46;  wheat  exports,  48;  wheat 
growing,  36;  wheat  possibilities, 
54 

Sicily,  comparison  with  Florida, 
442;  citrous  fruit  market,  442; 
lemons,  436 

Sierra  Leone,  327 

Silage,  substitute,  194,  195 

Silos,   118,   120 

Singapore,  408,  512,  514 

Skates  (fish),  333,  348 

Skim  milk,  300,  301 

Slavery,  negro,  102 

Slosson,  E.  E.,  Ill 

Small  fruits,  376 

Smith,  Captain  John,  333 


Smith,  J.  Warren,  113,   114 

Soil,  destruction,  597 ;  exhaustion, 
529 

Sokotra,    266 

Soldiers,  returned,  587,  604 

Sorghum,  132,  133,  484;  sugar-pi  in- 
ducing, 136 

Soudan.     See  Sudan 

Soule,  Andrew,  267,  607 

Soup,  174 

South  Africa,  apple  growing,  3U4; 
cattle,  235;  dairy  products,  268; 
dried  fruits,  425;  ostrich-farming, 
313;  peach  growing,  402;  sheep 
and  goats,  284;  wheat  region  24 

South  America,  coffee  industry, 
491;  potatoes,  152;  sugar  cane, 
470;  sugar  exports,  470;  wheat 
region,  24 

South  Carolina,  corn  production, 
120;  rice  growing,  90,  91,  101, 
103 

South  Dakota,  rainfall  and  wheat 
yield,  62 

South  Sea  Islands,  cocoanut  in- 
dustry, 321 

South  temperate  zone,  apple  grow- 
ing, 394;  cattle  industry  229; 
grape  land,  451;  peach  growing, 
402;  sheep,  importance,  279;  un- 
used land,  526 

Southern  hemisphere,  animal  abun- 
dance, 181;  dairy  products,  267; 
grape  growing,  445;  Southern 
States,  cattle  advantages,  238; 
corn  in,  119;  free  food,  604;  milk 
resources,  267;  mules,  207;  peach 
growing,  400;  potatoes,  154; 
sweet- potato  crop,  157 

Soy,  362 

Soy  bean  sauce,  174 

Soy  beans,  326,  360;  as  butter  sub- 
stitute, 363;  curds  and  cheeses, 
362;  top  of  plant,  358;  United 
States  production,  363 

Soy  sauce,  362 

Spain,  draft  animals,  206,  207; 
international  industrial  enter- 
prise, 518;  oranges,  435;  pulse 
plants,  359;  wines,  447 

Spermaceti,  340 

Spices,  value,  511 

Spinach,  canning,  412 

Spraying  fruit  trees,  377;  apple 
orchard  in  Virginia,  378 

Spring  wheat,  17,  26,  29,  66 

Squalus,  348 

Squids,    350 


632 


INDEX 


Standard  of  living,  413 

Standardizing  food,  569 

Stanley,  H.  M.,  164 

Starch,  139;  dried,  171;  manufac- 
turing, 171 

Starch  foods,  of  the  north,  138; 
tropics,  158 

Starches,  84 

Starvation.     See  Famines 

Starving  time,  407 

Steel  industry,  612 

Steers,  216 

Stimulants,  173;  sugar,  453 

Sting  rays,  333 

Strawberries,  376 

Stuart,  William,  161 

Sturgeon,   342 

Sudan,   235,   313 

Sugar,  bc-et-sugar  industry  in  Eu- 
rope, 457;  beet-sugar  industry  in 
the  United  States,  463;  beets  as  a 
source,  456 ;  by-products  of  manu- 
facture, 480;  cane  juice,  480; 
cane-planting,  478;  cane  sugar  as 
a  local  supply  crop,  480;  competi- 
tion of  beet  and  cane,  463,  464; 
consumption  in  the  United  States, 
453,  454;  Cuban  industry,  473; 
digestibility,  453;  exports  and 
imports,  various  countries,  454, 
455;  future  of  cane-sugar  in- 
dustry, 482;  governments  and  the 
industry,  461 ;  Great  Britain's  im- 
ports of  cane  sugar,  456;  Great 
War  and,  454,  455;  habit  of  us- 
ing, 452;  Hawaiian  industry,  474; 
increasing  the  cane-sugar  supply, 
483;  Javanese  development,  475; 
maple  sugar,  483;  Mauritius,  Re- 
union, and  Egypt,  477;  Philip- 
pines, 476;  production  in  the  Uni- 
ted States  and  possessions,  465, 
467;  source  and  history,  452; 
South  American  cane  sugar,  470; 
sugar  beets  and  intensive  agricul- 
ture, 458;  sugar  cane  climate  re- 
quirements and,  from  the,  468; 
sugar  cane  distribution,  469 ; 
trusts,  462 ;  West  Indies,  472 

Sulphate   of  ammonia,   392,   528 

Sun  as  source  of  power,  533 

Sunflower  seed,  327 

Sutter  Basin,  Cal.,  61 

Swamps,  524;  potatoes  in,  151; 
rice  growing  in,  94 

Sweden,  dairying,  262;  hay  crop, 
197 

Sweet,  Lou,  581 


Sweet-potato  flour,  156 

Sweet  potatoes,  distribution,  158; 
tropic  crop,  158;  value,  155 

Swine,  557,  558;  Europe,  300,  301; 
exporting1  regions,  298;  forest- 
ranging,  297;  grain  and,  298, 
303;  grain  consumption,  303;  in- 
dustry, 185;  inoculating,  304; 
Orient,  303,  304;  qualities,  295; 
United  States,  number,  299 

Swine  plague,  303 

Switzerland,  chocolate  factories,  509 
dairy  industry,  262;  millet,  136; 
potatoes,  145;  wines,  447 

Syria,    559 

Syrup,  corn,  111,  485 

Szechuen,  499 


Tallow,  216,  315 

Tapioca,  159,  171 

Tariffs,  610 

Taro  plant,  163 

Tasajo,  231 

Tasmania,  apple  growing,  394 

Taste,   sense  of,  69 

Tea,  487;  brick-tea  industry,  499, 
500;  British  colonies,  501;  China, 
498;  consumption,  498;  culture, 
factors  affecting,  497 ;  England, 
496;  Japanese,  500;  labor  factor 
and  United  States  growing,  502; 
substitutes,  503 

Temperate  zones,  food  limit,  587; 
unused  agricultural  resources,  52 

Teneriffe,    banana    cultivation,    167 

Terraces,  mangum,  564 

Texas,  cattle,  218;  rice  fields,  102, 
104 

Texas,  fever,  238;  quarantine  line, 
237 

Theobroma  tree,  505 

Thompson,   Sylvanus,   14 

Thompson-Seton,  Ernest,  212 

Thrashing  wheat,  30 

Tick,  cattle,  236,  238,  239 

Tierra  del  Fuego,  sheep,  283 

"Tilly"    (cow),  245 

Timothy,  192 

Tomatoes,  406,  409,  414;  story  of, 
426 

Tonoloway  Ridge,  384 

Tortilla,   123 

Tractors,  62 ;  cultivating  beans,  61 ; 
in  corn  production,  130;  in  rice 
cultivation,  103,  105;  value  on 
farms  growing  small  grains,  64 


INDEX 


633 


Trade,  free,  611,  613;  international, 
610;  sea,  6,  599;  world,  601 

Trans-Caucasia,  503 

Transportation,  566;  influence  on 
wheat  and  bread  supply,  33; 
wheat  exports  from  the  United 
States,  47 

Trees,  conservation  and  crop  trees, 
562;  crop-yielding,  542;  grain 
and,  555;  staple  foods  from,  559; 
tropic  crops,  596;  value  of  tree 
crops,  544 

Trinidad,  323,  472,  508,  510;  native 
food,  568 

Tropic  seas,  power  from,  532 

Tropics,  agriculture,  three  types, 
595;  America,  cattle  resources, 
236;  cattle  and  world  trade,  232; 
cooled  houses,  595;  fish,  349;  food 
resources,  172;  future  food  sup- 
ply and,  587;  inhabitants,  591; 
relation  of  peoples  to  northern 
prosperity,  593;  starch  foods, 
158;  white  man  in,  591 

Truck  farms.    See  Vegetables 

Tsetse  fly,  214 

Tucuman,  471 

Tules,  374 

Tulips,  518 

Tunis,  barley,  81;  desert  edge  vege- 
tation, 273;  dry  farming,  551; 
olive  trees,  552;  wheat-harvest- 
ing, 32 

Turkey,  limitation  of  industry,  30, 
32;  sheep  industry,  291 

Turkeys,   306,   310 

Turnips,  366 

Tuscany,   532 

Tuskegee  Institute,  sweet-potato 
flour,  156 


U 


United  Fruit  Co.,  164 

United  States,  apples,  379;  cane 
and  beet  sqgar  production,  479; 
canning  industry,  409;  cattle  dis- 
tribution, 223;  corn  value  to,  107; 
corn  production,  115;  creating 
unity  among  the  states,  602;  east- 
ern, drought  periods,  27 ;  farm 
land,  522;  grape  growing,  448; 
grape  growing,  commercial,  449; 
hay  crop,  192;  horse  industry, 
201,  203;  meat  and  men,  180,  181 ; 
meat  consumption  and  prices, 
181;  meat  from  cotton-belt,  236; 
oat  acreage,  78;  orange  growing, 


influence  of  railroads  and  cold 
waves,  437 ;  orange-growing  pros- 
pects, 441;  orange  imports,  437, 
441;  peanut  crop,  325;  potato 
centers,  149;  potato  crop,  143; 
potato  production,  147;  poultry 
and  eggs,  307;  rice  growing,  101, 
102;  rye  acreage,  73;  sheep,  num- 
ber, 284 ;  sheep  on  eastern  farms, 
286;  sheep  prospects  and  dogs, 
288,  294;  sugar  production,  465; 
467 ;  sugar  supply  and  production, 
477;  swine,  299;  tea  industry, 
503;  wheat  production,  25;  wheat 
regions,  24 

United  States  Fish  Commission,  352 

Unity,  world,  613 

Uruguay,  cattle,  231;  corn  produc- 
tion, 128;  sheep,  282,  283 


Valencia,  416 

Vanilla,  514 

Vanillin,  515 

Vegetable  milk,  361 

Vegetable  oils,  327 ;  future  food  sup- 
ply, 328 

Vegetables,  Atlantic  plain  produc- 
tion, 369;  California  industry, 
374;  commerce  in,  367;  drying, 
417;  importance,  186;  marketing 
surplus,  570;  Mississippi  Valley, 
374;  overproduction,  412;  plant- 
ing zones  in  eastern  United 
States,  371;  possibilities  of  in- 
crease, 414;  prices,  373;  standard 
varieties  and  packages,  569;  suffi- 
ciency, 176;  United  States  for- 
eign trade,  374;  United  States  in- 
dustry, 370;  United  States  trade, 
368;  use,  355 

Vegetarianism,  184 

Vegetarians,    173,   242;   Japan,    178 

Velvet  beans,  523 

Venezuela,  cocoanuts,  323;  coffee 
growing,  492;  corn  export, 
123 

Vicufla,  200 

Vineyards,  Finger  Lake  District, 
449;  Rhine  terraces,  448;  see 
also  Grapes;  Wine 

Violets,  368 

Virginia,  cattle  distribution,  222; 
grapevines,  449;  horse  raising, 
204 

Vitamines,  92,  240,  242,  263,  307, 
355,  365,  366 


634 


INDEX 


Volcanic  heat,  522 
Volcanic  power,  532 
Volga  River,  342 

W 

Walnuts,  543,  556 

War,  599,  600;  food  supply  and, 
8,  10 

Warren,  G.  F.,  246 

Warren,  G.  T.,  178 

Washington  (state),  wheat  climate, 
26;  wheat  growing,  54,  56 

Washington,  D.  C.,  school  garden, 
577 

Water  buffalo,  88,  97 

Water  mill,  96 

Water  pockets,  563 

Water  power,  531 

Watermelons,  366,  374 

Waterways,  583,  584 

Wenatchee,  Wash.,  388 

West  Indies,  bananas  and  hurri- 
canes, 169;  cacao  growing,  508; 
coffee  growing,  492;  corn  as  food, 
124;  pork,  227;  sugar  industry, 
472 

West  Point  Academy,  bread  for- 
mula, 75;  fats,  315 

Whale  meat,  341,  348 

Whales,  540 

Whaling,    340 

Wheat,  American  exports,  49,  50; 
American  thrasher,  31;  as  a 
"money  crop,"  34,  35;  Asiatic 
growing,  45;  Canada,  36;  com- 
panion of  crop  and  yield  in  Eu- 
rope and  America,  40;  continuous 
production,  35;  Durum,  58;  effect 
of  cheap  wheat  on  farm  values, 
38;  effect  of  roller  process  on 
growing,  29;  European  export- 
ers, 44;  European  growing,  41; 
Europe's  zone,  41 ;  exporting 
countries,  42;  exporting  regions, 
situation  compared,  47 ;  freezing 
and  thawing,  21;  future  supply, 
51;  future  world  supply,  52;  hy- 
bridizing, 55;  ideal  winter  for, 
22;  importing  countries,  42,  46; 
increase  of  yield  through  better 
methods  of  culture,  58;  interna- 
tional exports,  12;  machinery  in 
production,  30;  manufacture  of 
products,  49 ;  Mediterranean 
countries,  44;  new  areas,  53;  new 
varieties  of  seed,  55;  price  guar- 
antee, 52;  primitive  methods  of 


production,  30,  32;  production 
1839-1909,  65;  rainfall  and,  20, 
22,  23,  28;  rainfall  and  yield  in 
South  Dakota,  62;  Red  Fyfe,  29, 
56;  regions,  14;  regions  in  every 
continent,  18;  regions  with  good 
climate,  24;  Russian  thrashing 
floor,  34;  shortage,  52;  summer 
fallowing,  65;  supplies  in  1918, 
10;  temperature  and  yield  in  the 
Dakotas,  17;  thrashing,  30;  trade, 
comparisons  and  prospects,  38, 
40;  transportation,  33;  trans- 
portation and  export,  47;  United 
States  exports,  1912-18,  9; 
United  States  production,  25; 
United  States  production  by 
states,  22;  United  States  regions, 
24;  United  States  surplus  by 
states,  37;  value  of  the  tractor, 
61;  wide  distribution,  20;  world 
acreage,  19,  23;  yield  and  pro- 
duction in  new  countries,  34 

Wheat  eaters,  14 

Whisky,   109,  110 

"White  coal,"  521 

White  man  in  the  tropics,  591 

Wild  Goose  plum,  403 

Windmills,  532 

Wine,  445;  California  industry, 
450;  France,  446;  Italy,  445; 

Winter  wheat,  17,  26 

Wisconsin,  cherries,  405;  dairying, 
255,  257 

Woody  fiber,  366 

Wool,  285;   future  supply,  293 

World  government,  601 ;  conditions, 
603 

World  thinking,  601 

World  trade,  4,  6 

World  unity,  613 


Yaks,  212 

Yale  athletes,  186 

Yams,   159 

"Yellows,"  398 

Yemen,  490 

Yukon  Valley,  79;  potatoes,  153 

Yungas,  492 

Yupon,  503 


Zacetecas  pony,  205 
Zanzibar,  514 
Zulebra,  214 


THE  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

Santa  Barbara 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
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